Apologies, dear readers, for my recent absence. I’ll let you peek behind the curtain a bit here—I’ve found it difficult to find my groove. I’ve started and subsequently abandoned three different posts since my last published post. Each of them had merit and will likely warrant a post further down the road, but I just could not bring myself to a place of satisfaction with them. While that isn’t unusual—writing is just as much about pruning away unneeded words as it is about composing them—it is unusual for me to not find something worth finishing.
It was the hunt for something worth finishing that finally brought me to today’s post. In searching for meaning and truth, we so often begin our search outside of ourselves. That is not in itself an error; we have much to learn from the journeys others have taken, from science, and from our own observation. Yet there are times when we search and search, and though we may find things that we know are in fact meaningful, they may not be the precise meaning for which we are searching at the moment.
We’ve all felt the feeling of “I don’t know what I’m looking for, but I know that’s not it.” Oftentimes, we’ll ignore this feeling and settle on “that” (or something else like it) anyway. This time, though, I let myself live with this feeling. As a result, I slowly came to realize there was a one-of-a-kind, fractionally understood, borderline miraculous corner of the universe immediately available to me that I was overlooking and ignoring in my search for meaning and truth. You have one of your own, and it’s called your “self”. I assure you that yours is at least as miraculous and unique, as well as possibly under comprehended, as mine.
We so often neglect to turn our search for meaning and truth inward because we think there isn’t any to be found in our internal well. Allow me to supply a handful of reasons why I think this is a mistake:
First, we are part of that very rare state of the universe called Life. We have our own desires, dreams, and we organize and shape the things around us by imagining how we want our world to be and trying to make it so. To our knowledge, that sets us apart from stones, stars, and snow that we share this experience with.
Second, though we’re unique, we’re also the same. At a subatomic level, we’re made of the same stuff as stones, stars, snow, and everything else we experience. Though we think of ourselves as separate from the universe, we are inextricably part of it. If you doubt it, it’s worth asking what will happen to your body when you’re no longer living in it.
Third, we have the ability to comprehend and understand, to varying degrees, the universe of which we are a part. We are, in a sense, the universe’s way of understanding itself. This is profound.
Not all your search for meaning and truth needs to be grounded in philosophy books, nor in exploring the depths of cosmology. These and other avenues of discover are necessary and worthwhile, but it would be foolish to ignore the paradox in how we can be so different from the rest of the universe while also being an undeniably inextricable part of it. There are depths of wisdom to be gleaned from exploring the nature of something that lives as a paradox, something to which you have constant access.
So, take some time to know yourself. You will be wowed by the depths you find there once you start to explore them. And it isn’t merely self-help, either. In knowing yourself better, you’ll, by definition, know the universe better. Don’t pass up the opportunity to find meaning in your being.
-Parmenides
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