‘This I Believe’ | We all sleep under the same sky

I sometimes wish someone would raise a gun to my head, cock the hammer, and ask me what I believe. I could have that existential moment that would put me right on the brink, and I could figure out once and for all what life is really worth to me.

I have always been intellectually tenacious, mostly for the purpose of uncovering a substantial something that I believe in. So I persist with the question: What do I believe?

It would be accurate to say this question has defined the last four years of my life. And despite my utter obsession with it, the foundational landscape of my beliefs is utterly barren. I take everything with a grain of salt because one of the first commitments I ever made to myself was never to be ideologically swindled. I can't stand hearing "proofs" for things. "God exists." "God doesn't exist." "This or that is the way it is." "I can prove it!"

Sure you can. And I can prove that my hands are really typing right now. Except I can't! Not absolutely anyway. What the heck is a hand? Try finding an absolute and universal definition. This "grain of salt" habit of critical analysis has tainted my thinking. It makes every truth a half-truth and every belief a reserved or conditional belief. So, what do I believe unconditionally as an objective principle? Probably nothing. The search for objectivity, for something I can know rather than believe, has led me nowhere.

But when I reflect on those times when I was holding on by a shoestring, when there was a metaphorical gun to my head, I can think of nothing else but the statement: "We all sleep under the same sky."

I don't know who coined it or even where I heard it. It is not particularly poetic or brilliant by any standard that I have been taught, but it never meant anything to me because of some external standard. And, I think, if it is to have any meaning for me at all as a belief, it shouldn't ever be held to an external standard. After all, isn't this what an unconditional truth would be? It is the conditioner of everything else. It is itself the standard. So, call my phrase God if you'd like, but it is the transcendent quality of what it represents that makes it significant to me. I hold it, in the words of Soren Kierkegaard, "[as an] objective uncertainty ... with the most passionate inwardness."

I would hate to cheapen it through an analysis, and I am sure it wouldn't "hold up," but I think there are a couple of reasons I hold onto it so dearly. First of all, it reminds me that we're all condemned and thrown into this paradox together. Secondly, it reminds me that the paradox itself isn't always that bad; and when we take the time to pay attention, it can be quite astoundingly beautiful.

So if someone ever does put a gun to my head I can say to them, with the most passionate inwardness, "We all sleep under the same sky."