da Capo

Nietzsche has always been one of my favorite thinkers and to be perfectly honest, I never had a great reason why. I just remember always liking him during my younger years. Very recently I read about his thought experiment of eternal recurrence, and has that left a mark!

To simplify what I focus on with it - the thought experiment is to ask the question: what if we relive our life, precisely as we have lived it, forever. An eternal loop, of exact replication. All the suffering, all the joy.

The first time I read and thought about this, the rest of the day I couldn't think about much else. If that were the case, then how significant would every decision that I make be? If I chose to live an unhappy life, or an angry life, or an unfulfilled life, etc. then I would be making the decision to live that way for eternity - at least during those times of the life. That would put significant responsibility on what decisions we make - I felt that. It also does a great job of understanding that avoiding suffering is futile - it exists and will exist. To say "yes" to the eternal loop, we are saying yes to the suffering that came in the prior life. An acceptance of it, not hiding from it, but living through it and pursuing the life we can live that comes alongside the suffering.

There is a lot more to the concept and what he meant by this, but for me, this is what has caught my attention the most. Should I live my life in a way that at the end, I would shout "da Capo" - which means "from the beginning", ready to relive the choices I made. Do I choose to pursue this kind of life? Do I run from suffering or accept is as part of the journey? I try to think about this every day and try to pursue a life where I would gladly begin again.