The Beyoond
In the trenches of World War I, a young British soldier named Wilfred Owen was profoundly shaken by the horrors he witnessed on the Western Front. As he saw his comrades cut down mercilessly beside him, their lives wasted in the brutal machinery of industrialized warfare, Owen began scribbling down poetry that seared with piercing truths about the reality of combat.
In one of his most celebrated works, he wrote simply yet devastatingly: “My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity.”
For Owen and countless others in foxholes across history, the hell of war had granted them an unwanted yet undeniable proximity to “the pity” of existence – to the fragility of life, beauty butchered before its prime, love deprived of its chance to fully blossom, and the agony of seeing our fellow humans transformed into mangled casualties. All the mundane barriers that insulated them from these elemental yet unbearable truths had collapsed under the barbarity of armed conflict.
It’s a tragic paradox that for many, war seems to be the only arena that amplifies life into enough visceral clarity for them to finally connect with the urgency of embracing their humanity. Perversely, the threat of imminent death awakens them to the privilege and duty of truly living and loving while there is still time.
Yet, what human anguish and societal brokenness is evidenced by the necessity of being plunged into warzone trauma in order to be shaken into practicing emotional authenticity and appreciating existence’s tenuous beauty? Why must so many individuals wait until they are in the line of fire, stripped of worldly comforts and staring death squarely in the face, before they have the courage to say those three simple words that matter most: “I love you”?
The Illusion of Safety
For those who have never been to war or witnessed its devastation firsthand, a lifetime can be squandered behind a psychological reinforcement of self-protective illusions – blind to the sanctity of human bonds, oblivious to time’s frightening finite nature, numb to the transcendent gift of simply being alive. Comfort and routine can so severely hamper our grasp of life’s precariousness that we procrastinate on what really matters until that illusion is demolished.
There is a scientific component to this sightlessness. Neuroscience has shown how the brain’s reticular activating system (RAS) prioritizes information that verifies our existing beliefs while subconsciously filtering out or disregarding input that contradicts the reality we prefer to inhabit. When we are not actively confronted with vivid reminders of our mortality or the stakes of not living fully, it’s easy for the mind to push those discomfitting notions aside.
That psychological buffering protects our equanimity temporarily, but at the great cost of obscuring what compels us to embrace our humanity and those we love most. We become sleepwalkers going through routines, blind to the urgency of this cosmically improbable chance to be conscious, until fate startles us into awakening.
The Cost of Not Listening
Few forces jolt people out of this waking slumber as violently as the rupturing of violence, devastation, and sudden mass death visited by warfare. But there are also less seismic yet still traumatizing episodes that can trigger the same emotional thunderclap – a terminal diagnosis, a near-death experience, the irrevocable loss of a loved one.
These are the wrenching moments that can strip away the insulation of normalcy and comfort to expose life’s ruthless truth that our day-to-day existence is a constantly replenished privilege rather than a guarantee; that our human bonds are ethereal treasures sorely squandered when treated as sturdy fixtures in the backdrop of habit.
As long as we refuse to heed that harsh wisdom until it knocks us over the head, we are forever postponing the actualization of our richest sentiments and most authentic presence. Not until we face down our mortality do many dare to risk vulnerability, share those innermost feelings they habitually swallowed, or let themselves feel the full, unbearable beauty of the person sitting across from them.
The paralysis of this procrastinating emotional availability becomes starkly apparent when soldiers on foreign battlefields pour out their hearts in letters home for the first time – expressing untapped reservoirs of affection and ruptured revelations about what really matters in those potentially final words. Simple platitudes take on metaphysical resonance: “I love you,” “I’m grateful for you,” “I should have told you…” Why did it take this hellish existential threat to unearth these fundamental truths?
Living with the Urgency of Those at War
Of course, most will understandably recoil from the notion that we must endure anything remotely approximating the violence and carnage of war in order to be jolted into authentic living. That willful indifference to our fragile mortality may be a tragic curse, but only a troubled mind would wish the trauma of warfare upon humanity as the antidote.
There must be a path to achieve the same emotional urgency and clarity about the sanctity of our finite lives and beloveds without having to endure the nightmares that rupture soldiers’ psyches and awaken them to such elemental wisdom. If we can glimpse the truth they witness on a continual basis, then perhaps, like them, we can learn to cherish each day and bond with the significance it deserves.
For that, we may need to cultivate what could be called “existential mindfulness” – purposeful daily rituals and routines that strip away the illusion of infinite safety by forcing us to confront the transitory nature of this human experience. Whether through meditation on our mortality, savoring each bite of food and each loved one’s smile as if it could be our last, or imbibing art’s bold portrayals of the fragility and stark beauty of existence, we can work to make the RAS filter for, rather than against, these fundamental reminders.
It’s about living with the urgency and presence of those who have looked into the vortex of the grave and returned to live as if seized by the collar – to banish all emotional procrastination or embrace love and life more fervently each day, before the window slams shut permanently. If we can habituate to living within that existential truth rather than fleeing from it, perhaps we can sidestep the need for traumatic awakenings in order to live and love at our fullest.
One Day, We Too Shall Say Those Words
Yet even for those devotedly striving to practice this existential mindfulness, the human capacity to retreat back into the somnambulant comfort of denial is formidable. Ingrained habits of emotional suppression and life on life’s autopilot can be brutally intractable, which is why it often does take life-shattering trials to obliterate them and catalyze true transformation.
There may inevitably arise extreme crossroads when the choice is to either connect with our sincerest feelings or ossify into cynical, soul-deadened resignation over life’s cruelties. Birth and death vigils, soul-juddering brushes with mortality, anguished final moments with a beloved – there are existential crucibles no mind can completely prepare itself for when the viscera of what matters defibrillates one’s emotional shutters wide open.
In these radical moments, even the most steadfastly self-contained individuals may find themselves involuntarily blurting out those words they’ve held at bay for so long – “I love you.” Almost as if their body is overriding their resistance and forcing them to feel and vocalize the truth while it’s still tangible.
Indeed, the human life cycle itself seems to have encoded into our species the need to express love overtly toward the end, when our expiration date looms near. It’s as if a deeper biological wisdom takes over, liberating us from repressive self-consciousnesses to express those primal but highest sentiments we too often allowed to lay fallow within. If nothing else, the prospect of death compels us to quit procrastinating on the emotional experiences we know deep down are the whole point.
In these inevitable crossroads, we join the brotherhood of those shaken into appreciating the simple miracle of being sentient and connected to profound bonds. Like weary grunts stumbling in from the battlefield, we at last allow ourselves to really experience our loves and lives with unguarded sincerity.
Those simple, powerful words of acknowledgment start to flow as a visceral recognition of what has always been there, waiting valiantly to be unburied from beneath our wariness and ingrained deferment. We see the preciousness of the soul shining before us and finally honor it without inhibition. We give name and voice to the sacred elements of existence that had become so cloaked in profane routine.
“I love you.”
The trench awaits us all in one form or another –
