Chasing After the Wind

"Yet when I surveyed all that my hands had done and what I had toiled to achieve, everything was meaningless, a chasing after the wind; nothing was gained under the sun."

Ecclesiastes is one of my favorite books of the Bible, simply because its message and view of life are so unexpected. We often believe that it is ungodly to feel despair or frustration with the futility of life, but here in the holy canon of Scripture are twelve chapters about how pointless the whole human experience can feel. From this I learn that we are allowed to have existential crises as long as they end in awe of God and a call to remember one’s Creator.

‘Chasing after the wind’ was on my mind yesterday as I backed up computer files. The laptop I have been using since the beginning of 2010 is now nearing the end of its life, and even though it occasionally claims to have Internet access, it won’t load web pages, and that means I cannot back up writing or photos on the regular websites I use. Yesterday, I spent time loading recent work onto an external hard drive to back up on a different household computer. The tedious process, and my fear of losing anything I had not backed up, made me see the absurdity of the human quest to preserve what fades in time.

We know that we are going to die, and that our lives are merely short bursts of activity in the scheme of the cosmos, but we still want a sense of permanency, and just as some people fight against aging, I fight against the inevitable decay of the world around me, whether it is a computer dying or journals burning up in a house fire. I want to know that what I have made will be preserved, and am willing to expend enormous amounts of time and energy in my attempts to thwart potential disaster.

Humans want to make themselves immortal, and we want to create something lasting and meaningful, but ultimately, there is nothing new under the sun, and everything is meaningless. The older we get, the more we feel like life is a race against time, and when we try to pack pleasure and meaning into our days, the more hollow and unsatisfying the good things become. Modern psychology and philosophy urge us to focus on developing the inner self, but introspection too rings hollow when our life seems pointless and we know it will end in the grave. The only answer to the fundamental human problem is to shape our lives around what is eternal, because although we should delight in good earthly pleasures, they cannot be the core of our happiness or identity. Eternal souls demand eternal satisfaction, and the more we cling to temporal things to make our lives meaningful, the less we can enjoy them for what they are.

As Ecclesiastes says, there is a season for everything: all temporal enjoyments and experiences have their time and place, and we shall enjoy them best when we do not demand constancy in all our loves and pleasures. “I have seen the burden God has laid on men. He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the hearts of men; they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end.” We want to possess the beauty we see; we wish to pass into it and feel whole with the joy and the pleasure of good things which bring us delight. This universal hunger for beauty and meaning is a God-given drive that should lead us to Him, but it creates despair and futility when we look to satisfy our longings anywhere else. That which is beautiful in its time only becomes worn and faded when we elevate it to the eternal. 

Eternity is in our hearts, yet we cannot find it in our pleasures or in the examination of our inner being, for the joy and meaning that we do encounter is merely a flickering, fading reflection of what we find in God. To discover satisfaction which sustains the weight of our souls, we must seek Him, and instead of despairing over the entropy, uncertainty, and futility of our lives we should remember that we are dust entrusted with immortal spirit. "Remember your Creator in the days of your youth," for someday, the eternity set in your heart will be visible before your eyes.