Be like water...

“Success and failure are both difficult to endure. Along with success come drugs, divorce, fornication, bullying, travel, meditation, medication, depression, neurosis, and suicide. With failure comes failure.” – Joseph Heller
Many people throughout history have discussed suicide. It has been understood both as a form of cowardice and a form of heroism. Aristotle believed that even though suicide displayed bravery in the face of death, it is always the escape of some fearful thing and so it is the love-child of cowardice. Albert Camus wrote about suicide being the only thing that a man can do that is truly taking control of his own life. Phil Donahue believed “suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem.” Shakespeare focuses on suicide over and over throughout his plays and, coincidentally they are featured in his most celebrated plays “Romeo and Juliet,” “Hamlet,” “King Lear,” “Othello,” and more. There was even a time in our history that believed that suicide was fashionable as satirically portrayed in the Winona Rider movie “The Heathers.” Dante Alighieri believed the innermost circles of hell were reserved for the abhorrent individuals who chose to commit suicide instead of face life. Arthur Schopenhauer said, “They tell us that suicide is the greatest piece of cowardice… that suicide is wrong; when it is quite obvious that there is nothing in the world to which every man has a more unassailable title than to his own life and person.”
I fall on the side of cowardice. Life is hard. It’s supposed to be hard. It’s hard for every animal on the planet, the difference being our knowledge of the difficulty. I can agree that surviving in life is difficult and the knowledge of our unforgiving existence is regrettable, thus I suppose that suicide, or the wishing for death to come, is a means of relieving the pain and difficulty. But it is not life that we are hoping to avoid through suicide; rather, it is the tribulations and afflictions that confront us in life that we run from through suicide. So, suicide simultaneously delivers us from our pain, but condemns us to never experience the positives that come from life.
We refuse to accept the vicissitudes of life and this is why we are met with adversity that we believe we cannot overcome except through suicide. Some forms of martial arts, such as Aikido, discuss the forces of fighting like the forces of nature, more specifically as the force of water. The key to be truly prepared to endure any attack from an opponent is to remain in a relaxed position that is adaptable to an attack from any angle. Most importantly, one should not attempt to defend the incoming force with opposing outgoing force; rather, the trick is to use the incoming force as a method of avoiding the contact. Is that confusing? Instead of trying to block a punch by forcefully raising your arm, logically it is easier to avoid the punch by stepping to the side and using the puncher’s momentum to put him to his back. Such is the same in life. Instead of fighting against the difficulties of life, which can lead us to take extremes measures to avoid them, we need to work with the forces of nature in order to survive. We say we want to live in reality, that is what “The Matrix” portrays, that if given the choice between a real reality and a fake reality we will take the real one. I agree with this idea, but I disagree that people truly want this. Most people are like Cipher from the first matrix movie, they wish they had taken the blue pill.
Reality is the painful and usually slow realization that your life is not like the movies and books you have wished them to be. Your life is hard and it sucks, but it’s a better option than death I assure you. Our buddy Chuck Palahniuk said, “Reality means you live until you die. The real truth is nobody wants reality.” They want a hyper-reality. They want a life that they believe they deserve rather than the life that they have been given. Suicide may not be cowardice and it may be brave, or the opposite. I don’t know for sure. I can tell you this much: with people trying to hang on to life by a thin thread, clinging on and fighting to endure things unimaginable, even the mere contemplation of suicide, let alone the act of suicide, is a direct slap in the face. Some have lost loved ones against their wills, and when they are confronted with a person who decides that taking their own life is their will, I think it is perfectly acceptable to slap them right back. Draconian laws are acceptable with suicidal miscreants.
“There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance, that imitation is suicide, that he must take himself for better or for worse.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson