The Deepest Meaning
I’ve been on a hunt to find the deepest meaning of life, my life, for as long as I can remember. These pursuits have taken me down the multi year and decade rabbit holes of religion, work, spirituality, studies, family, love, hobbies and philanthropy. From my earliest memories, finding meaning was a quest of upmost importance. With my journal, satchel (NOT a man purse), my favorite RSVP pen, a DSLR and always a small print hard cover of Wiewei, Thoreau, London, Kerouac or Gibran as a lens to decipher the world from. I went out into the world seeking all the mystery and secrets it had to offer. It was mine to interpret, with no clergyman or member of the ruling class to be afraid to look upon.
My earliest memories as a child, this quest was my street and then neighborhood. The imprinted midrib scars of now long gone fallen leaves on the once wet concrete, from my couple decade old driveway, were mistaken for remnants of pre-historic hieroglyphics fossil scars of the sedimentary rocks I’d seen broadcasted in far away places on the Discovery Channel. The ancient discoveries and mysteries of the universe were right there feet from my front door. It was wondrous and I ached to understand it.
With my first car meaning was the local mountains, and high desert, or the geography of a girl. With college it was studies abroad in Europe, Asia, and Latin America. Camping in the woods, sleeping on trains, backpacking, hitch hiking. Anything to just keep seeing over the next horizon. I had to know what was beyond the mountain pass.
With my 20s meaning was drugs, relationships, cycling across the country. Long fasts and desert repents. Poetry, love, and hallucinations. Some it causing pain, but nothing I regret in becoming and learning what I know.
And now in my (late) 30s, the pilgrimage to find meaning continues with raising a family, a steady income, a career, financial security and a greying/thinning hair line. And though I plan to live for decades longer, and unlock further quests of what is the deepest meaning. today, right now, in whatever arbitrary split time of whatever lap I am on around the sun, I hereby declare what I have found to be the deepest meaning of life.
So let’s get into it. Here is my best and most recent attempt at finding the deepest meaning of life:
Don’t get tripped up on what it is right or wrong. Good or evil. Sin or good deeds. Right or left. Communists or capitalist. All of this is part of a larger fabric of survival and perpetuation of control and nothing more. Respect the rituals you’ve been handed, honor why they were handed to you, but examine them ruthlessly and often and then decide for yourself what you will carry forward. Everything serves a purpose, so don’t disregard anything before it’s time. What are you carrying around, who are you if you drop those things? And what of those things are undroppable? This constant examination is the work you need to do. Don’t give your power or attention away, and be quick to drop what no longer serves you.
The fabric of existence is to create itself. Cooked into the crucibles, spanning the omnidirectional space time continuum, and traceable to the vibrating strings of our quantum foundations, life is a creation of itself. Everything forever is a vast and iterative mirror of itself. The Cosmos way of knowing itself is to create life itself. And though we haven’t seen it yet (because we just started looking), and soon will, the universe is teaming with life. Because life is everything and all around us, extending into forever. You are a mirror reflection of something so complex and magic that extends the universe and all of space time. Fragments and iterations seen directly in your immediate ancestors and interpreted in your intentions, but immutably traceable to the origins and beyond of an infinite iterative universe. You are the universe clamoring through painful transformations of cataclysm for the brief moment of being able to know and feel itself. The stars see themselves in you when you look out at them into the night sky. Don’t think too hard into whatever your building or doing. Find your flow, decide what do be and go be it. Create, put one foot in front of the other, and trust the process. You have the pattern and design of the whole working for you behind the scenes.
You are made of stars. You are heavy element matter cooked under extreme pressures and spewed outward, you are formed by ancient star matter older than the sun. A mix of cosmic design in the universal fabric flows through the raw star guts of your body, to ignite the capacity for you to conceive, and the universe to conceive you. Be demonstrative and kind to yourself. Your body is a space suit protecting you from the harsh and persistent elements and it will ache and eventually fail you because of the corrosive and radioactive nature of the environment it has to navigate everyday. But its wonderful.
Nothing has been understood. The abandoned dog is left to be disposed while the pure bred is selected for the family adoption. The ugly sibling discarded while the beautiful one is celebrated and doted upon. The universal iterations of all things is the underlying mechanism that creates the rare and valuable in the first place. It is all the like workings, the mechanism that made all iterations is the same thing. The thing rejected, forgotten and discarded is just as sacred. Everything is the same thing, and nothing has been understood as such. The rare and valuable is only so because of the discarded. And the discarded is so because of the rare. Love in a way that expresses love for the entire cosmos. Love the underlying mechanism and its design that made all things.
You are alive for an instant. We cannot fathom time, because there is no such thing as time. We stay in the same place while the vast road ahead slowly morphs to the short path we’ve already trodded. We don’t get older, life just gets shorter. Then the end of your life, your final breathe will be your entire life. A blink. Life is just perspective. Mindfulness of it is the medication and resolve. Be here now and see it, breathe slowly, deeply and be absolutely present to as many moments as possible in your life. The deeper you breathe, the slower the seconds pass. This is the work that must be done.
Everywhere is war. The nature of life, iteration, and existence is the painful transformation from one state to another. Chemically, entropically, biologically, emotionally, physiologically, economically. Understanding this is a must. You will suffer and struggle your whole life. The beauty is in knowing yourself, which is knowing the universe. You are the thumbnail of another being yet entire galaxies exist in you, and wide open spaces. You are part of this chain, part of the sacred, and part of the universal. And to be such, is to suffer, be in pain, and be at war. To be consumed, and to be the consumer. We get to wake up, we get to be aware, we get to struggle. Be strong in your mind and health so you can be a participant in this war. All of your greatest blessings are from the devastation of something somewhere else. Your devastation is a blessing elsewhere.
There is nothing to do, just be. Ultimately beyond your Maslow needs, and the demands of society and culture, and the requirements you need to maintain your well being, everything is the workings of the same apocalypse. You are merely vibrating strings, interpreting yourself as art, love, dancing, and simultaneous meaningless and meaningful doer-ship. So find your meaning in the present, and what is right in front of you. Everything dies, yet everything goes forever. Don’t accomplish anything. Just be, and dance, and wiggle, and love whatever you love, and stretch, and treat a visit to the DMV as if you just landed on Earth for the first time. Move, and cry, be kind to yourself, and laugh, and call and squeeze your loved ones.
We are no closer to anything. All efforts of anti-entropy just make more entropy elsewhere. And postpone the inevitable entropy of the original effort. Nothing has been resolved, nothing has been understand, nothing has been completed. We are no closer than we have been. We have accomplished nothing. Don’t accomplish, be present to the things you love and witness them, so the universe can feel love through you. Your job is to become a participant in the goings and comings around you, in the deepest sense of whatever that means.
And finally, there will be joy, there will be grief, and none of the great mysteries will be solved. Your final job is to live each moment in awe.
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I’ll circle back in another decade with when I find a deeper meaning.