Although I have been a member (not very active though) of this board for four years (ever since I faded from the JWs, after some 35 years of association, that is) I never disclosed personal info about myself but, now that JWS is in its "last days", I though I'd like to offer, as a "thank you all" note, a few thoughts that I wrote back in January 2005, a year and a half after my fade. I wrote these notes mainly for myself, and the only one who read them so far is my wife. English is not my mother tongue, so I apologize for the mistakes. Here it is, for what it's worth:
"Where I am and what am I at this stage of my life? My feelings swing from exaltation to uneasiness to fear, going through all the in-between stages.
I feel exaltation for having eventually broken free from what I now understand as being futile superstitions that so heavily affected my existence. But did I really break free? You can't erase in few months the stance through which you've looked at and interpreted the world for your entire life. I still feel this burden on my shoulders, like a heavy and uncomfortable inheritance. I sense it in certain reactions that present themselves to my mind according to old patterns and automatisms, and that I have to consciously point in new directions and guide off the beaten tracks.
But I feel uneasiness too, because that structure gave meaning to the world and answered all my questions, generating confidence, assigning me a place, outlining a future that today I know being an utopia, but that gave me direction and was real as long as I considered it such. And now that that structure has collapsed like a house of cards against the hard reality of facts that I had long suspected but tried to ignore, putting them aside, I live the discomfort of no longer knowing what's my place and the struggle of having to re-invent my identity and to give a new meaning to myself, to life, to the world surrounding me.
What is today my vision of life? My thoughts? My projects?
I think that life on this earth is a wonderful and mysterious coincidence, and that consciousness, which separates human existence from that of other living beings, is at the same time a burden and a delight: the element that allows us to enjoy but also to suffer to an extent that must be unknown to beasts.
The element that has given birth to art, philosophy, abstract thought, faculty to love. But also the element that brings with it the weight of questions, the consuming desire to give things a meaning, which man confronts himself with ever since the surfacing of the first glimmers of his consciousness of existing and of the fearful and unexplainable vastness of the world inside him and around him. The element that, as a reaction to this need, created gods, holy books, religions.
I think the only purpose of life is to live it, trying to be good to ourselves and to those who happen to be around us. I subscribe what Fernando Pessoa wrote: "In this world we all live as if on board of a ship sailed from an unknown harbour to an unknown harbour; we need to act towards the others with the amiability of fellow travellers". And, since it is apparent that the earth and nature don't care about the billions of living beings that populate it, the only solidarity that we can give and receive in order to soothe the travel's discomforts is from our fellow humans and to our fellow humans.
Thus I watch the people around me and I try to feel sympathy, even affection, for these unknown fellow travellers, and I find out it's not easy at all. I scan their faces and I wonder what they think, how they live, and whether I should care, whether I could do for them something more than just passing by them trying not to be a nuisance.
I think death is part of life and should be accepted as such, I think we are the biological vessels of our genes, the only ones to survive and to really be immortal.
I'm spelling out these thoughts but I'm aware they are not so easy to come to terms with. No doubt they are much less reassuring than those that used to reside in my mind. They aren't thoughts in which one can wrap himself as if in a comfortable blanket and fall peacefully asleep. Or maybe one can, but it takes time to get used to them.
They are thoughts that make up a structure that is fragile, but real (to the extent we can call "real" what is developed by our mind, that always interprets) on which one can try buinding an identity and a future. A structure with no reassuring and at the same time fearsome heavenly Father, with no pre-packed anwsers to questions about right and wrong, a structure that puts back on my shoulders the burden of life and of choices.
When I started tearing down my old convictions, with trepidation at first, then ever more courageously, at times even with fury, there were moments when I was afraid a superhuman wrath would come over me as a punishment for daring to challenge my fathers (my fleshly father and the Father). It wasn't easy to do and to this very day I'm surprised how I managed to somehow survive through all this.
Every single day I can't help being pleasantly amazed by the fact - obvious in itself - that life goes on, the sun rises and falls, everything flows as always, the blood in my veins and the planets in their orbits, and everything is reasonably fine.
But I can't help also - less pleasantly - to keep on feeling somewhere the wafting of an obscure threat, as if some great adversity were lying in wait around the corner, ready to come and grab whatever fragment of peace and harmony that little by little I manage to achieve.
It's an almost constant thought, that makes it difficult for me to completely relax. Everyday I wonder when it will come, and what shape it will take, and whether I'll be ready and strong enough to accept it and face it. I know that, if anything happens, it'll be for the will of that one god, blind and imperturbable who, just as the old Greek Moirae, runs the threads of our life and our death: Chance. But what really annoys me is that somebody will think I would have deserved it, inescapably connecting it with my dissidence.
Another unpleasant thing is not having anybody to discuss these things with. The old "brothers" whom I walked and worked with side by side for a lifetime have dissolved them like snow under the sun, simply disappearing. Apparently we didn't really know each other and didn't really feel much for each other, kept together by the only link of a common ideology. And even if a relationship would have survived this storm, for all of them an inexplicable insanity, I don't know whether I would be inclined to face the risk of opening my heart, and I doubt that I would be understood anyway.
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I know not who put me into the world, nor what the world is, nor what I myself am. I am in terrible ignorance of everything. I know not what my body is, nor my senses, not even that part of me which thinks what I way, which reflects on all and on itself, and knows itself no more than the rest. I see those frightful spaces of the universe which surround me, and I find myself tied to one corner of this vast expanse, without knowing why I am put in this place rather than in another, nor why the short time which is given me to live is assigned to me at this point rather than at another of the whole eternity which was before me or which shall come after me. I see nothing but infinites on all sides, which surround me as an atom and as a shadow which endures only for an instant and returns no more. All I know is that I must soon die, but what I know leasts is this very death which I cannot escape. - Blaise Pascal, Pensées, III, 194"
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Note: Things have improved for me ever since I wrote this, and if I have been able to regain balance and mental peace, this is partly due to my (often silent) participation to this board. So thank you to all of you. I know that at least you can understand me.
Behemot