Tepid

Much like water’s unending quest for its own level human experience eternally returns to the tepid. War, violence, and real suffering make the daily headlines but do not constitute the majority of actual experience. The euphoric, likewise, whets the appetite and allures its many devotees, through bacchanalia, extreme sports, virtual reality, religious worship and a hundred other forms and yet, so many sublime moments are just this: moments, sweet and fleeting. It is the transience of both euphoria and misery that infuses our high and low, sweet and sour experiences with the potency of their meaning and not solely the dramatic nature of their occurrence. The experiences are “special” precisely because they do not last. All of life is thus circular, not only in life from death and death from life but also and especially as a continual coming to terms with the tepid, the bulk of our experience, the hedonic treadmill forever under our feet, the run-of-the-mill our baseline, the ordinary our gravity and forever faithful.

The tepid certainly does not preclude gratitude, nor contentment for that matter, only something more than the middle. But is there nothing else? Is this really our essential plight, managing mediocrity, or, could human life be a gestalt whose wholeness is somehow greater than the sum of its placid parts? Might there be a mean between the manic and depressive extremes of experience other than the insipid? If so, only the mad may know, although charlatans peddling promises of positivity are a dime a dozen, as hope dies hard. Indeed, hope was the very last of the evils in Pandora’s box, left for humanity’s perpetual anguish and amusement.