You wake up in the morning and suddenly this thought comes to your mind: another boring day! This thought can make you care about nothing. You say to yourself: so what? when you consider the fact that nothing really matters in the end and we’re all going to die after all, you realize the absurdity of it all. In german they call this feeling Weltschmerz which literally means world pain or world weariness.
But you hear another voice inside your head whispering: boy, you are very right to think like that, however, these thoughts despite their truth are not very practical and don’t change anything.
There is an idiom in english which says: make the best of it. I like this idiom and the reason Why I decided to write about it is because I read somewhere that a german pessimist philosopher called Julius Bahnsen had used this english idiom in one of his writings. So as you see, pessimisim doesn’t and in fact shouldn’t prevent one from doing whatever he/she can to make this awful world that we live in a little less awful. It is perfectly true that we’re all eventually going to die someday and from this point of view everything might seem pointless, but we have to come to terms with it, because it is also true that thinking about our predicament will not change anything, so we might as well try our best to make this world a better place both for others and for ourselves.
I like to describe what I mean in this way: by trying to make the best of life we actually take revenge from it.
And here is where dear Khayyam comes to our aid. If you read his beautiful poems you will notice that he is not really in favor of life on earth and yet at the same time he advocates enjoying it as much as possible. This is by no means a contradictory statement, it
rather demonstrates the profound wisdom behind Khayyam’s poetry. If I had to live alone in a desert or some distant place and could only bring one thing with me, I would certainly choose a copy of Khayyam’s poems.
So, making it short, we’d better try to “make the best of life” and despite all the sufferings it contains, we should nevertheless take advantage of those little moments of pleasure and happiness that come to us, because life is short and it’s not worth bothering much.
