What do I know? Not much...(Part 3)

“Hey, do you know what you want?

Just askin’…”

- anonymous 

The first instance:

Why do you do what you do? 

Look away from this page and think about it for a moment or two.

Your first thought might be, “What does he mean?  My job? My family?  My relationships?  My hobbies?  I’m not sure what he means.”

At the moment, there are no criteria other than simply taking a moment, no matter how vague the answer and see whether you find any resonance within yourself.

The second instance:

Why have you taken the time to figure out things for which you have talent? 

After all, you arrived on the planet with no roadmap, no traveler’s guide to the universe, and no direction to the meaning of life.  By the way, does your life have meaning?

You showed up, were given a few generic tools – a language, some food, and a little protection for period of time.  Then came some very rudimentary rules about this brave new world and off you went!  Knowing neither from whence you came, nor the destination to which you are compelled – you are compelled you know!

Fortunately, entering into this ‘Brave New World,’ others before us have provided guidance – if we accept it – to help reduce life’s friction.  But like learning the alphabet, we first have to accept the ideas and act on them…getting around in life takes time. 

As you know, it works like this.  First come the letters, often memorized through verse or song.  Next specific combinations into words – again memorized and repeated.  Finally sentences which express simple ideas.  Eventually, the alphabet becomes an incidental (albeit important) tool to express streams of conscious thought from one to another – fulfilling a need that was unknown when the process began.  Like planting seeds in the field, written language only has real meaning once it has matured and re-produced after its kind…fulfilling the destiny of those simple and singular letters.

Why do you do what you do?

This piece began over coffee with my friend Bill a few weeks ago.  It led to a number of thoughts and wonderments as to what our lives might have been like had we made different choices.  We got it that once experiences were written on the pages of our lives; they are unchangeable, yet it was nice to reach into the recesses of our minds to visit old friends and life’s familiarities.

The conversation then drifted toward what if anything is next. 

What is next?  That would be the question wouldn’t it?  After all we were given tools to help us navigate life on this earth, but what tools have we been given for what’s next?

There are writers, philosophers, theologians and prophets who have provided us with spiritual guidance for the next stage of our journey, but where is the evidence?  How can we know for certain?  Is it about faith alone?  Is there something we must do?  Are there certain ways we must live?  Is there really something more than this finite journey that will of little doubt terminate?

Why do you do what you do?

This broader question has occupied my mind for decades.  So let me put it into a more personal context.  Why do I do what I do?  Why have I done what I have done?

Had I tried to answer this question earlier in my life, I would have had little to say, because there was little I knew.  In the early decades, it took all the energy I had to learn the alphabet (accept certain teachings – just because)…decades to learn the alphabet of the ‘what’ before I could approach the ‘why,’ and decades to find the vocabulary necessary do discover even the beginnings of an answer. 

The overreaching context for these thought has been ‘what do I know?’  Not just think…not simply believe…but know (Knowledge: The fact of condition of knowing something with familiarity gained through experience or association.” – Webster’s).

I now know why I have done the things I have done…and why I do the things I do.  All of them have been directed toward a desire to live forever…to never die. 

After all, from the Launchpad of birth, and through every experience we encounter, we grow and increase in our knowledge and understanding.  We are not geared for failure, but for success – surely there are things we attempt in the process of refining our lives that miscarry, but we do not begin something with the idea that it will end up in failure.

This drive, this primal urge has led to the following simple questions and observations:

What do you do when you are hungry?  How about when you are cold?  When the weather is inclement? 

In our lives, almost all of the desires we have, whether physical, as above, or spiritual (e.g. knowledge, wisdom, faith, love, tenderness) have mechanisms for satisfaction – the instinctive hungers able to be fulfilled.  I am not saying all of them are…but rather as a species, we are able to find ways to quench our needs.

There is, however, a need that we are unable to satisfy.  It is a need that drives us with a primordial undercurrent that is as strong as any urges we have.  It is the need, the overpowering and unrelenting desire to be remembered…to have meant something…to have been relevant…to have counted.

Do not underestimate this.  Empires have been built, civilizations created, novels written, families procreated all in the name of remembrance.  And yet, with the tiniest of exceptions, this elusive mist slips away with the dawning of a new generational day.  The greatest of individuals of the eras in which they lived, for the most part are not even footnotes in the pages of history.

Legacy?  Seriously?  The people who build die…those who remember them die…and eventually the pebble of that life sinks to the bottom of the pond, as the next pebble hitting the water overwrites the concentric circles of their accomplishments.

Rather than seeing what appears to be wasted energy for fame as a commentary on the meaningless of life and effort, I see this drive as an insight into the eternal…Simply a misunderstanding in the grasping and use of this most primitive of driving forces on our lives.

Why would we be given a spiritual hunger that could not be satisfied in this life?  It is because attempting to satisfy it in a physical sense only is a misplacement of its enormous power – the power to transcend this part of our journey into its next stage.

To be continued...

- ted