Hamlet asked: To be or not to be—that is the question. 2Pac struggled: Is life worth livin' or should I blast myself? Camus argued in The Myth of Sisyphus that there is only one fundamental philosophical problem: suicide.
Where Hamlet and 2Pac asked, Camus found an answer. Meaning does not arise despite absurdity but through it. Life is not surrender to nihilism. Life is rebellion. And in that rebellion lies our true creative power.
When I wrote my thesis on nihilism and suicide, I wrestled with this thought. How do you turn emptiness into strength? How do you pull yourself away from the abyss and carve a path back to the light? At the depth of that struggle, this poem was born.
Heart of the Panther
There must be an opposite of suicide — the moment when someone, abruptly and radically, pulls themselves back from the abyss, snatching their existence from the claws of destruction.
A hand wrenches the heart from darkness. A child breaks free from the jaws of death. An eye tears open— breaking with raw force the veil of existence and letting love in.
A will, sharp as a panther’s leap, strikes, with everything that breathes, back into the light, back into life.
Living is more than accepting the absurd. Living is the reversal, the leap. The anti-suicide. Darkness that we, again and again, turn into day. THERE lies our true strength. THERE, in that leap, in the relentless will to be-there lies the miracle of life. Not as surrender, but as fire. Not as acceptance, but as struggle.
Fill that fire with everything that burns within you-and yes, then life is an explosion of meaning.
