Wish you an existential crisis
I never understood the blessing of a ‘long and happy life’. That seems more like an instruction than a blessing. It is an instruction that's not only difficult but also quite useless to follow. When I reach an age where I am considered worthy enough to bless others, I am going to wish them that they face an existential crisis at least once in their life. And that they figure out a way to survive it. That might sound like an ill-wish, but it's not. Existential dread is that paralyzing sense of the world being the way it is regardless of what you do. It's the taste of the absurd. That moment where your helplessness pushes you to alienate from yourself. You tend to look into the mirror and you can see through the image in there and yet not recognize who it is. It's like laughing in mute and crying without tears - an outpour of expressions without the accompanying substance or the soul. Probably all that sounds horrible to wish even to your enemy let alone your family, friends, or children. Yet, I would wish that for you and would wish for you to creatively survive it.
I am not referring to the identity crisis, by the way. In fact, there is nothing quite unimportant and uninteresting than an identity crisis. I am not talking about “who am I”, “what am I doing with my life”, “does my life have any purpose”, “do I even matter”, “do I belong/fit in here” and those other thousand I, me, myself questions that are nothing but a veneer of shallow temporary seeming curiosity over the constellation of insecurities collected by the privileged selfish adolescents that suffer a morbidly chronic case of arrested development throughout adulthood. If you start a thought with “I”, it’s not really existential. That's just you - a self-absorbed entity - being confused or defeated at the moment and not being able to fathom the idea that even someone like “you” could be in the position where you are. So, I am, indifferent and maybe even cruelly apathetic to an identity crisis. Wishing someone an identity crisis (or recovery from it) is like paying any attention to the mundane activity of a kid finishing his meal paid for by his parents and served by his maid.
The experience of existential crisis is quite significant. You are not questioning your life, you are questioning life. You are not skeptical about the words and actions of those around you but rather despondent about the intentions and the schemes of the universe. It's not about questioning whether you matter or not but unfaithfully interrogating what matters and what doesn't, including the very ability to question and the act of questioning. The crisis makes you fall for dispassion, something that you otherwise have no reason to encounter. It would help if you faced the very serious possibility of everything being meaningless at least once in life. You should live the moment where you see within and beyond yourself and startle at the continuity of hollowness. It's critical that you experience the existential crisis and necessary that you survive it. There is no one way to survive it. And my money would be on the prophet who declares that there is no survival guide as such. That's mostly because although the crisis might be universal, the survival is personal. There can be ideas, poems, music, paintings, equations, and experiments that can rescue you but the responsibility of discovery and inventory of all such pieces of collective human life is upon you. I also don't want to commit to the deception that there is an “other side” when you “come out” of the crisis. There is no tangible other side. When it comes to an existential crisis, the suffering and survival may as well look and be the same or they may be different - I wouldn't know for sure.
I probably did an awful job at selling existential crisis as a decent wish in itself. So, let me try a more consequentialist way. We all have come across the story of Enlightenment. Siddhartha meditating under the Bodhivriksha (The tree of awakening), in a moment, experienced something that changed him into the Buddha — that changed humanity forever. I have always wondered what Enlightenment truly means. I can understand that our history had to take note of the moment when humanity exploded the first atomic bomb or the moment when a member of our clan discovered gravity, or when someone else looked at the structure of the building block of all life - DNA - for the first time. But how does an experience (Enlightenment), with no possible description of its content or no accountable memory of its existence register itself in human history and rise to the top of the list of greatest moments in humanity? My guess is that the moment of Enlightenment is glorified due to the human craving for stories. Trapped in stories, our unsatiable and predictable minds further lust for the element of climax. The moment of Enlightenment acts as a convenient climax to Buddha's story. What is probably more likely is that Siddhartha was suffering existential dread and slowly and inconspicuously transitioned to surviving it. Enlightened Buddha is actually just a manner of nomenclature of Siddhartha's survival of existential crisis. It's more of an unshown prolonged anticlimax than the romanticized momentary climax. Enlightenment is largely constructed on surviving existential crises and living to be able to tell others about them. So, I am wishing you more than a long or happy life. Covertly, I am wishing you a real chance at the mystic enlightenment.
Yours
SiZa