Life Is Smoke: Engaging Reality on Its Own Terms
We all know on some level that life surprises us. We might try to control it. We might even think we’re getting close to figuring it out. And then something new comes along to shake us.
Ecclesiastes’ main speaker (referred to as “the Teacher”) describes this seeming absurdity of life. The well-known and sometimes bewildering declaration that jumpstarts Ecclesiastes (“Meaningless! Meaningless! Everything is meaningless!”) lets the reader know they are in for a trip. The book moves through the heights and depths of life’s ecstasies and tragedies, all in an attempt to make sense of what it means to be a person.
What the hevel?
Interpreters have understood the refrain of “meaningless, meaningless” in different ways. Some translations exclaim “futile!” or “vanity of vanities!” All English translations are attempts to wrangle the Hebrew word hevel, meaning “smoke” or “vapor.” In fact, that’s what Eugene Peterson goes with in his paraphrase: “Smoke, nothing but smoke… There’s nothing to anything—it’s all smoke” (Ecc. 1).
What does it mean that everything is hevel? Through studying Ecclesiastes and my own lived experience, I’ve come to think of the “meaninglessness” of life in the realm of “absurdity.” To be human on earth can feel absurd.
Comparing Proverbs and Ecclesiastes
Just before Ecclesiastes, the book of Proverbs tells us how it thinks things on Earth will go. Save your money, and you’ll have enough when you’re old. Wisely choose a partner, and they will take care of you. Raise your children in what’s right, and they will follow the right path. Prepare for life, and things will be generally fine.
It’s my experience that these things are usually true. They are reliable rules for life—they give much wisdom to live by. But Ecclesiastes then comes as if to balance it out with absurdity. Ecclesiastes says you can save your money and then lose it all in a global depression. You can choose a good partner, and they eventually turn their back on you. You can take care of yourself for years only to get a terminal cancer diagnosis. You can give your children everything, and they grow up to hate you. Life can feel absurd. We need Proverbs to know how to live, but we also need Ecclesiastes to help when “living rightly” doesn’t work out as we expect. There’s a reason both of these are included in the Bible’s wisdom literature.
Hevel tells us that life is wild and elusive. Our attempts to take control of reality, to wrestle life to the ground and make it behave exactly as we would like, just aren’t going to work. It’s trying to grab smoke.
Comfort in Absurdity, Meaning in Presence
There’s a comfort in the fact that life is a vapor. What do we ask when suffering, big and small, hits us in life? We ask, “Why?” This makes sense—we are meaning-making creatures. It feels like if we understood why something happened, it might be easier to take. Sometimes, we end up tirelessly striving to find, understand, or even make up a certain meaning to the suffering we face. But what if the experience of a mere human is such that we aren’t going to know the meaning? What if life is just hevel?
This is where the comfort, or maybe a better word is “relief,” can set in. If life defies our attempts to make it make sense, we can slowly release the need to know exactly what’s going on in our suffering. We can relieve our white knuckles, open our clenched fists, and simply undergo the pain and emotion that suffering will bring. Unfortunately, that part isn't going away—pain and the emotions it brings are unavoidable in this life. They need to be taken on, processed, and digested—not avoided. But by releasing the need to find the specific and individual “meaning” of suffering, we are opened to engage reality on its own terms. As hard as it is to say, when we are fully open to the suffering of others and ourselves, we are more open to life itself.
Amidst all of the hevel, we have what is before us. So much of Ecclesiastes reads as a call to presence. You have what you have today: the people, the food and drink, the work, the service to God and others, the space around you. Even when life’s difficulties hit and it all feels absurd, we still have who and what’s before us. Maybe that’s enough to keep us going.
