H,
It begins like any other day. There is this hunger for happiness, this reaching
for something more sublime than ordinary life. In essence the mantra “we are
made for more” spread out through all our days ad infinitum. We cannot fill it
with anything else. We cannot pleasure it away. The infinite sadness will only
kill us. The things we do with our hands and head have a shelf life and the
visage we make of ourselves will fade into history, like the dust we may be
from and may be going back to shortly. There is nothing temporary that sticks. Only
what will never die has the value we seek. “Eternity in the hearts of men” and
all that.
Perhaps, I go too far. It is enough to know that these present
principles are limited in scope and depth. We only ever talk about one thing:
purpose. We talk about it often and we try to live it in our choices but it is
easier said than done. There are so many easier parts to feeling, even
temporarily, okay. Still, we come back to the great question of purpose, of
meaning, of who will be when the lights go out and there are no more fences to
hide behind. There is a knowing to come that will surpass all our present senses.
All our fears will conflate into meaning and there will be nothing left of
them. In our 50s, will we look back at these 30s and 40s and laugh at this
focus on things that do not matter anymore? Well, laughing is always better
than crying.
All we have, brother, is the wisdom for today. The thing we must attempt
today. The character we must show, and not in that dubious moral sense that
people say “build nations”, but in the deeper sense of being involved in the
act of living. We cannot relent in our search for the light. Or, more accurately,
in the accepting that the light is searching for us.