"Sometimes I wish I was never born at all . . . "  So sang Freddie Mercury, the late lead singer for the band Queen.  It's a poignant yet tragic desire, a desire, however, I suspect many of us, at times, might have shared.  Sometimes life overwhelms, sometimes who we are inundates us, and sometimes the thought of being born simply to die is, as Albert Camus pointed out long ago, "absurd."
     Perhaps.  Thinking about what he believes to be, in context, the futility of existence, the writer of Ecclesiastes observes, "Better off than both of them [the living] is the one who has never existed, who has never seen the evil activity that is done under the sun" (Ecclesiastes 4:3).  Better, he contends, to not have lived than to live and be witness to the vexing machinations of the human species.
     On the one hand, Camus and Ecclesiastes are correct:  if life is indeed absurd, why bother with it?  Yet if we, through no effort or fault of our own, find ourselves here, here on this planet, here in this life, are we not better to, as Paul Sartre noted, to take hold of it and live it to its fullest?
     It seems that we are.  However, unless we resolve the essential conundrum of life's absurdity, we will still live and die in existential contradiction.  We'll never know why we ever lived, except that, well, we lived.  Though this is certainly true, I think that, in our heart of hearts, we all wonder about it:  why us?  Why anything at all?
     In the end, it's either absurdity and bravery or faith and God.
     Be thankful:  you're here.