The worst day of my life

One of my favorite bloggers has a new regular feature in which readers ask him random questions and he answers by video. Today's question was, what was the worst day of your life? I didn't have time to watch the video but the question immediately led me to think about what most bystanders would assume to be the worst day of my life: August 5, 2011, the day SB's brain tumor was discovered.

But strangely it's not. That day, to paraphrase a famous Muslim poet and a German philologist, exists beyond good and bad, best and worst. It is impossible to properly convey. The world was never so vivid, my senses never so heightened, my life never so real and meaningful. There was never a question of what I should be doing or where I should be.

Everything was so immediate and real. Of course, it was terrifying as well. Terrifying as in causing terror. The thing about terror, though, is that it's a key element in what philosophers have called the sublime. Although there has been loads of disagreement on the concept, the definition that's stuck with me is that the sublime is the pleasure we get from being threatened and overwhelmed by nature. It is the intense feeling of the fragility of life.

In this very narrow sense, that day and the few that followed were sublime. Although our lives are now about battling, managing, problem-solving, and persevering, we are reminded occasionally of the depths and immensity of the forces we face. Our worst days are those of drudgery, not those when we are reminded how terrifying our situation really is.