A while back, I faced an incredible existential crisis. You know, one of those things that gnaw at the holes inside you and make you question why you even bother to get out of bed in the morning.

It started about a year before my mom died. I went to bed one night, and while lying there, I felt myself slip into one of the darkest depressions I had ever known. It was an incredibly dark time in my life, and I wouldn’t wish what I went through that year on my worst enemy. Yes, it was more than just a bad night. It was a deep, all-consuming depression that put me in a haze for months on end and really made me contemplate suicide.

Thankfully, I chose to live and just muddle through it. Looking back on it, I can see very clearly how I got there. At the time, I thought I was happy one moment and then suddenly in the darkest depression of my life. But that wasn’t really true. It was a very slow descent into madness, one initiated by the incredible stress I was under.

At the time, I wrestled with this madness and found a way through it, but it took me several years to really find a way out. It led me to alcoholism to numb the pain, and that was a wonderful trap that took several years to break out of.

Ironically, the first crack in the armor of that depression came from the oddest place. It was a memoir written by Kevin Hart that gave me my first real clue to finding happiness again.

The source of my crisis centered on the idea of purpose and meaning, the need for this life to mean something. I kept thinking about how we all have a few short years, and then we disappear into the recesses of time. In a thousand years, nobody will have known who I was or what I did here. In a billion years, this Earth will be completely destroyed, swallowed up by the sun, and everything the human race has ever done—or ever will do—will be completely void.

It’s a heavy thought, and it depressed me to no end. At the time, I was still a teacher, a career that had brought great meaning and purpose to my life. It made me feel like I was doing something that mattered. Until it didn’t. Until the behavior issues, the stress, and the whole system started weighing on me.

And then I thought about my parents. Both alive at the time, but getting older by the day. I knew my time with them was short. One day, I would wake up and they would be gone, and I’d never talk to them again.

And then I thought about my kids. Both were getting older, just a few years away from graduating high school. They would get their own lives and leave me behind—all alone.

Yeah, it was a great big ball of depression centered on the fact that I was losing myself in a world I had constructed to distract myself from one universal truth: NOTHING I DO OR EVER DO WILL EVER TRULY MATTER.

And then I found Kevin Hart and his book I Can’t Make This Up. It’s such a fantastic book, and an even better audiobook. It’s funny, endearing, and inspirational. There’s so much quotable material in it. And there are many lines that helped pull me from the depths of depression and allowed me to catch my breath that year. But here’s the one I like the most:

“My future was out there. It was just waiting for me to find it. And the challenge was not to give up on myself just because it seemed like everyone else was pulling ahead of me—and leaving me further and further behind in the months that followed. That’s the test that each of us faces in life: Can you fail and still be strong? Can you not fit in and still accept yourself? Can you lose everything and still keep searching? Can you be in the dark and still believe in the light?”
—Kevin Hart, I Can’t Make This Up: Life Lessons

And that was the moment I stopped letting the darkness consume me and started fighting back. And isn’t that the true nature of humanity? To stare into the depths of our empty souls and dare to create something out of nothing? Isn’t that the thing that makes us most like God (if you even dare to believe in such a being)?

I didn’t realize it at the time, but it was leading me to the antidote to such a negative and depressing mindset. In fact, I would wander around in darkness for years after that, battling grief and depression and trying to find purpose in a world where I was no longer doing the thing that had once brought me such meaning.

It reminded me a bit of the story from the Bible about the Israelites wandering the desert. Imagine how they felt that first day, following Moses out of Egypt. That first day entering the world as free men and women. It must have been an amazing high. What an incredible breakthrough—to have God part the sea and lead you to freedom.

But then they wandered in the desert for forty years. They wandered for forty years. FORTY. FRIKIN. YEARS.

I imagine they must have felt what I was feeling: lost, hopeless, without meaning or purpose.

Some of the most incredible breakthroughs of my life led me to teaching in the first place. It was such an amazing time in my life, where I cast off my old insecurities and dared to imagine a new possibility for myself.

Only to have it all end in such a tragic way. I quit in the middle of a school year because I just couldn’t take the stress anymore. And I too spent the next few years wandering around my own internal desert.

Until I truly began to understand the point of the desert. It wasn’t wandering without purpose. It was wandering designed for one purpose: to teach them the true meaning of life.

And that is that your struggles and your battles don’t have to ultimately lead to anything. You aren’t supposed to keep flying higher and higher. That’s just your brain addicted to the dopamine of the next big high.

The truth is much more boring than that. And that is: all you have is this present moment, and you are meant to live in that moment perpetually. There’s no such thing as the past or the future. The universe exploding in four billion years shouldn’t concern you because you won’t be here to witness it.

What matters is this moment. And sometimes, in this moment, you’re meant to be bored. To sit with your pain and have thoughts and emotions. Life will be good sometimes, and it will suck a giant rubbery one sometimes. But the beauty of it all is that it’s all happening in one perpetual now.

So don’t you think it’s time to embrace the thing you’ve been avoiding by flipping through your phone? The thing that all those books and music and movies are truly distracting you from? And that is this present moment—and who you are in this moment. Because that’s all you truly have.