With palms together,
The question arises what really matters? Does our life really matter or is it something about our life? Life itself is just a metabolic process:all living things do it, nothing special. Yet, we cling to it as if “our life depended on it!”
Freud talked about two drives, Thanatos and Eros, death and love (perhaps more directly life itself). All living things strive to continue to live, but with us, with a self-awareness that asks why, why do we hold on to living so tightly? We are set apart from other life.
We strive always to take that next breath, discover that next image taste or smell. And in the struggle we question. Questions give rise to meaning—- or at least they send us down the path to discover meaning. Our journey however doesn’t end: it’s a perpetual journey where one step never suffices and one breath rarely stands alone. We continue to ask and we continue to breathe.
Perhaps one way to address the question is to simply assume there is no ultimate answer save the process of questioning. Or should we consider it living where it seems to me living is apart from life. Life is just life, but living is doing something with that life and for us that something is to question, is to assign meaning to that which we perceive or think about.
Somethings just come and go, don’t they? Nothing but the passing of thought on the breath. Some other things stop us dead. What’s this? We ask. What’s this indeed.
It’s not the object of the question that’s actually meaningful, it seems to me, it’s the fact that it stops us in our tracks.
It turns out, ours is to reason why!
The question arises what really matters? Does our life really matter or is it something about our life? Life itself is just a metabolic process:all living things do it, nothing special. Yet, we cling to it as if “our life depended on it!”
Freud talked about two drives, Thanatos and Eros, death and love (perhaps more directly life itself). All living things strive to continue to live, but with us, with a self-awareness that asks why, why do we hold on to living so tightly? We are set apart from other life.
We strive always to take that next breath, discover that next image taste or smell. And in the struggle we question. Questions give rise to meaning—- or at least they send us down the path to discover meaning. Our journey however doesn’t end: it’s a perpetual journey where one step never suffices and one breath rarely stands alone. We continue to ask and we continue to breathe.
Perhaps one way to address the question is to simply assume there is no ultimate answer save the process of questioning. Or should we consider it living where it seems to me living is apart from life. Life is just life, but living is doing something with that life and for us that something is to question, is to assign meaning to that which we perceive or think about.
Somethings just come and go, don’t they? Nothing but the passing of thought on the breath. Some other things stop us dead. What’s this? We ask. What’s this indeed.
It’s not the object of the question that’s actually meaningful, it seems to me, it’s the fact that it stops us in our tracks.
It turns out, ours is to reason why!
No comments:
Post a Comment