“What if a demon were to creep after you one night, in your loneliest loneliness, and say, 'This life which you live must be lived by you once again and innumerable times more; and every pain and joy and thought and sigh must come again to you, all in the same sequence. The eternal hourglass will again and again be turned and you with it, dust of the dust!' Would you throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse that demon? Or would you answer, 'Never have I heard anything more divine'?”
- Nietzsche
I love Nietzsche. He gets right to the heart of things and makes you wonder at your ideas and conventions. Do you regret the choices you've made? Would you live the life you have made for yourself and over again? And would that change what you did now? It almost sounds like the 'if you knew you were going to die in X amount of time, what would you do' question, but one that challenges your entire life. You will live out all of your mistakes and all of your glories forever more. All that you do now will be repeated time and again. You can not escape to an afterlife, you can not escape what you run from. On the flip side, you will relive all of your loves, all the perfect moments you had forgotten to appreciate. The next time you relived your life, would you remember to not take those moments of calm, of still and quite happiness, for granted?
What is Nietzsche trying to say? That we're screwed to live out miserable existences? Maybe, he was kind of a debbie downer when it came to the condition of mankind. But maybe he wanted us to accept that we all make mistakes, that we all at one point find ourselves in our loneliest loneliness, but despite all of that, we must not define our lives by our failures, but by our triumphs. In our darkest hour, we must not let that demon convince us that to repeat our lives would be hell, but a chance to happily live life again, even with all its lows. We must remember that to live is to be loved and be hurt, to forgive and to regret, to teach and to be taught, to be sick and to be healed. Life is a give and take. The bad gets mixed up with the good sometimes, but there's never one without the other.
There is no escaping Nietzsche's question, but you have a choice in how you answer. You can gnash your teeth and curse your existence, or you can be thankful to exist.
