There comes a moment when life becomes almost unbearably absurd.

Not funny.

Not meaningless.

Absurd.

You stand somewhere between everything you believed life would become, and everything it actually became, and the distance between the two is so enormous that you almost have to laugh.

We spend decades constructing lives as though permanence were one of the building materials.

We buy houses.

We accumulate things.

We build careers.

We defend reputations.

We nurture grievances.

We keep score.

We worry about money we may never spend and possessions someone else will eventually carry out of our houses.

We argue with people we love over things neither of us will remember.

We sacrifice today preparing for tomorrow, and then one morning discover that tomorrow has quietly become yesterday.

And somehow we call this normal.

Perhaps normal is the most absurd word we ever invented.

Because nothing about being alive is normal.

We awaken every morning on a small planet spinning through immeasurable darkness, orbiting a star, surrounded by mysteries we cannot explain, carrying consciousness inside fragile bodies destined to return to dust, and our greatest concern on Tuesday afternoon may be that someone did not answer our email.

That is absurd.

Gloriously, painfully, magnificently absurd.

And perhaps we need the absurdity.

Because without it, it is terribly difficult to see.

---

I used to believe wisdom was the gradual accumulation of answers.

Now I wonder whether wisdom is mostly the collapse of questions that never mattered.

Life has a peculiar way of doing this.

Death walks into the room, and suddenly half our vocabulary becomes irrelevant.

Cancer enters a family, and nobody cares who won the argument.

A marriage trembles, and accomplishments hanging on the wall become strangely silent.

A parent dies and objects that once seemed ordinary become relics.

An old table becomes sacred because you remember who once sat around it.

A handwritten note becomes more valuable than the furniture.

A voice you heard thousands of times becomes priceless precisely because you cannot hear it again.

Absurdity rearranges value.

It takes the price tags off everything and asks:

Now what is it worth?

And suddenly we know.

Not intellectually.

We know in that deeper place where truth hurts before it heals.

---

I think this is why suffering sometimes awakens what comfort allows to sleep.

Comfort whispers:

There is plenty of time.

Absurdity whispers:

Are you sure?

Comfort says:

You can tell them tomorrow.

Absurdity asks:

What if tomorrow never comes?

Comfort says:

Protect yourself.

Absurdity asks:

From what? Love?

Comfort says:

Acquire more.

Absurdity points toward the cemetery.

And there is the strange gift.

Absurdity is ruthless with illusion.

It does not necessarily tell us what life means.

It simply destroys many of the things we mistakenly believed gave life meaning.

And perhaps that is where awakening begins.

---

Ecclesiastes understood this thousands of years ago.

Vanity of vanities.

The Hebrew word is hevel, vapor, breath, mist.

Try holding mist.

Close your fist around it.

There.

That is life.

Not worthless.

Unholdable.

That distinction changes everything.

The tragedy is not that life disappears.

The tragedy is spending our lives trying to prevent it from disappearing and thereby missing it while it is here.

We photograph the sunset instead of watching it.

We document the meal instead of tasting it.

We plan the vacation while sitting beside someone we love.

We save the good bottle.

Protect the good china.

Postpone the conversation.

Wait for circumstances to become perfect.

And meanwhile the universe continues turning without consulting us.

The absurdity is breathtaking.

---

Camus imagined Sisyphus condemned to push a stone up a mountain only to watch it roll back down again.

Again.

Again.

Again.

It is difficult not to recognize ourselves.

We wake.

Make the bed.

Answer messages.

Pay bills.

Wash dishes.

Cut grass.

Earn money.

Spend money.

Fix things.

Replace things.

Lose things.

Buy more things.

And eventually someone else cleans out the house.

The stone rolls downhill.

But perhaps Christianity makes an astonishing claim precisely here.

The stone is not the whole story.

There is a stone that was rolled away.

That image has become almost too familiar for us to feel its power.

Humanity says:

Everything dies.

The empty tomb answers:

Perhaps death does not get the final word.

Humanity says:

Everything disappears.

Christ says:

"Behold, I make all things new."

Suddenly absurdity is not the enemy of faith.

It may be the doorway into it.

Because faith begins where our illusion of control ends.

---

I have lived long enough now to see the comedy hidden inside my own seriousness.

Things I once thought would destroy me did not.

Things I thought would fulfill me could not.

People I desperately wanted to impress disappeared from my life.

Victories I thought I would remember forever have become paragraphs.

Failures I once wanted erased became teachers.

Wounds became doors.

Detours became roads.

Losses revealed loves I had underestimated.

And some of the things I begged God to change were apparently the very things He used to change me.

That may be the greatest absurdity of all.

We spend much of life asking God to remove the chisel while He is sculpting us.

We ask Him to calm the storm while something inside us can only be awakened by thunder.

We pray for answers when perhaps what we need is transformation.

And afterward we look backward and discover that grace sometimes wore very strange clothing.

---

Maybe the human condition is worthy precisely because it is so absurd.

We know we will die, and plant gardens anyway.

We know hearts can break,  and fall in love anyway.

We know children will leave,  and pour ourselves into them anyway.

We know friendships can disappoint,  and trust anyway.

We know our bodies will weaken,  and climb mountains anyway.

We know civilizations disappear, and build cathedrals anyway.

We know the song will end, and still we sing.

There is something magnificent about that.

A flower blooming in a desert is beautiful partly because of the desert.

A candle means little at noon.

But carry one into a dark room and suddenly you understand light.

Perhaps mortality does the same thing to life.

Without death, would a kiss matter quite as much?

Without separation, would reunion?

Without night, would dawn?

Without winter, would spring?

Without the possibility of losing someone, could we ever fully understand what it means to say,

I love you.

The boundary creates the preciousness.

The ending gives the story shape.

---

And this is where absurdity becomes almost sacred.

It humiliates the ego.

The ego wants permanence.

Control.

Recognition.

Certainty.

It wants the universe to explain itself.

The soul asks something different.

Can I love while I am here?

That may be the dividing line between being half awake and being alive.

The ego asks:

How long will this last?

The soul says:

It is here now.

The ego asks:

What will I get?

The soul asks:

What can I give?

The ego asks:

Will anyone remember me?

The soul asks:

Did anyone feel loved because I was here?

And suddenly the absurdity begins to look different.

Maybe the point was never to conquer impermanence.

Maybe the point was to become fully present inside it.

---

So yes, life is absurd.

Terribly so.

Beautifully so.

We are creatures made from dust who dream of eternity.

We are temporary beings capable of permanent longing.

We carry infinity somewhere inside bodies that wrinkle and weaken.

We bury people we love and then somehow wake the next morning and make coffee.

We cry at funerals.

Laugh at dinner.

Fall in love again.

Plant another garden.

Hold another grandchild.

Watch another sunrise.

And somehow keep going.

There is something almost holy about that stubborn human refusal to stop loving merely because love cannot be possessed forever.

Perhaps that is why the absurdity matters.

Without darkness, light becomes difficult to see.

Without silence, music becomes noise.

Without endings, beginnings lose their wonder.

Without mortality, life might become invisible.

And without absurdity, 

we might never awaken long enough to notice the miracle hiding inside the ordinary.

The coffee.

The hand.

The table.

The tree.

The forgiveness.

The laughter.

The person sitting across from us.

The breath entering our lungs without being asked.

The ridiculous, fragile, heartbreaking privilege of being here at all.

Maybe the great question is not whether life makes sense.

Maybe the question is whether we were awake enough to love it while it was happening.

Because one day the stone will roll downhill for the last time.

One day the room will become quiet.

One day someone else will stand where we once stood.

And perhaps, in the end, the strangest thing about this absurd human life will not be that it ended.

It will be that something so temporary could have mattered so much.

And finally, remember.  

God said it was very good.