Situation

We cannot escape being situated – situation being the mode we exist in from our first to our last breath. The sum total of psychological, physical, and historical givens that make up our lives' fluid, ever-changing concrete circumstances – our situation is what shapes and is in turn shaped by us. No sooner do we enter this world than we are threaded into a densely woven fabric of relations, hopes and expectations, freedoms, possibilities and limitations, demands and restrictions, duties and obligations. While being enmeshed with the situations of countless others, each individual life unfolds within the parameters of its own unique circumstances. More or less passively buffeted by our situation's manifold determinant forces at first, we gradually mature into active participants in the continual process of its transformation. As we become responsible agents within the shifting dynamics of our inextricably situated lives, we come to realize that our situation hinges on the core experience of what I summarily call pressure: in the face of the human condition as such, in the face of the concrete external circumstances confronting us at any given moment, and in the face of our own needs, desires, dreams, goals, and aspirations.

This threefold pressure to be, act, and do something at the core of our existence, which both impels and constrains us, manifests itself in different, more or less immediate and palpable, ways – for instance, as the background awareness of the passage of time in general and the concomitant sense that we need to 'get on it'; as a subtle feeling of urgency in the face of the realization that the breadth of our options, choices, and possibilities in life is inversely proportional to our age; as the concrete set of internal and external demands, expectations, and deadlines characterizing any given situation from infancy to old age; as an implicit or explicit sense of what Alan Watts calls "moral urgency" in view of the cultural frameworks (religious, ideological, political) we happen to be emplaced in.

Thus, even the most ostensibly relaxed and pressure-free circumstances will be constitutively permeated by the inexorable undercurrent of pressure at the heart of humanity: the structural pressure exerted by the vise of the beginning and end points of our lives, whose memento mori provides the ground bass to the variegated symphony of all our endeavors. Take, for example, the following situation: I am sitting at my bedroom desk on the top floor of the house we rent every year on Cape Cod toward the end of summer, overlooking the magnificent sand flats of First Encounter Beach during low tide, speckled with seagulls recovering from the most recent hurricane; my wife is reading a story to our youngest son; his brother is engrossed in his own book, while our oldest is somewhere out there, taking a late-morning walk in this most serene of landscapes, where presence is all, where substance and accident appear no longer distinguishable, where the I melds with its surroundings, where peace is manifest in the all-enveloping sough of the echoless chamber of an early September day on the beach ... And still, the white noise of finitude resonates through this quiet after the storm, intermingling with the distant roar of the receding surf of Cape Cod Bay. Somewhere in the recesses of my being, I dimly sense the muffled reverberations of the pulsing of time as a kind of irreducible, subconscious awareness expanding in ever-widening circles: that soon our vacation will be over, that certain things will need to be taken care of right after we get back, as I will be flying to Europe twice in the coming month, that I have several important deadlines looming in the not too distant future, that my oldest son has only two months left until his college exams and that he mustn't miss his application deadlines, that I must double check on our family health plan ... that I am forty-four and that I sometimes feel perhaps I ought to have accomplished more in life by now ...

The majority of situations in our lives, however, are obviously nothing like the one just described, which must remain a rare and cherished exception. It is safe to say that the more typical situation we find ourselves in in the course of any given day will be orchestrated to the relentless ticking of the clock and driven by a mix of private and public needs, duties, responsibilities, and exigencies, which we navigate with greater or lesser calm, contentment, and equipoise depending on our personality, circumstances, emotional state, physical and mental health, etcetera. Still, whether we are ostensibly happy or unhappy hamsters in first-class or economy wheels, whether we lead or straggle in the proverbial rat race – none of us will escape the law of situation. As G. W. F. Hegel observed, both master and slave are caught up in a dialectic of mutual recognition and interdependence – even the most ostensibly omnipotent being cannot help being under pressure to be, act, and do things a certain way to the extent that it needs others to be acknowledged as such. The ball of being, living, acting, and doing has been irrevocably kicked into our court; from the get-go we ineluctably find ourselves in a continual existential zugzwang that we can never seem to be able to live down.

Why is it that our lives transpire by way of an unceasing concatenation of more or less palpably pressure-driven situations, and what does it mean for our everyday lives and interaction with others?

Pressure Points

Whatever else it may be ostensibly motivated or triggered by – an impulse, urge or volition, an order, threat or request – the pressure I am here talking about is fundamentally a function of time. If time didn't pass, there would be no need or urgency to act or do anything now rather than later, or at all, for that matter; pressure would loose its grip on us and vanish into thin air. We are constitutively under pressure to be, act, and do something because we are creatures of time, because we live, act, think, and feel in time – the matrix and horizon of our existence.

As I suggested earlier, we experience the pressure to be, act, and do something at the heart of our situation in three respects: in relation to the human condition as such, in relation to the concrete external circumstances confronting us at any given moment, and in relation to our own needs, desires, dreams, goals, and aspirations. The reason that we experience...