Examining life
Accelerating hard up the dark streets from the Ford Parkway Lifetime toward my apartment near I94, life felt perfect. I had just wrapped up another hard workout, and I was headed home to spend a lovely summer evening with my fiancée. It was late July, 2008. I remember the song I was listening to as the cool air whipped through the car: Cellophane Girl, by Graham Colton.
I thought I had it figured out, but was I ever wrong. Wow.
Now, I feel that I’ve got it figured back out. I’m likely mistaken, yet, the comfort of my naiveté is tremendous. The solace of limited understanding is a veneer, a faux finish, over our conscious minds — we don’t trouble ourselves with what lies underneath the surface; that is, the “whys” of life. Too many of these questions could make life unbearable. Too few, and you miss the richness of the world, the nuances that color everything.
Still, people find joy in ignorance. A quote from The Matrix:
You know, I know this steak doesn’t exist. I know that when I put it in my mouth, the Matrix is telling my brain that it is juicy and delicious. After nine years, you know what I realize?
Takes a bite of steak
Ignorance is bliss.
And still, people find joy in embracing these huge questions that underlie our very existence. A quote from Plato, Apology 37e-38a:
Perhaps someone might say, “Socrates, can you not go away from us and live quietly, without talking?” Now this is the hardest thing to make some of you believe. For if I say that such conduct would be disobedience to the god and that therefore I cannot keep quiet, you will think I am jesting and will not believe me; and if again I say that to talk every day about virtue and the other things about which you hear me talking and examining myself and others is the greatest good to man, and that the unexamined life is not worth living, you will believe me still less. This is as I say, gentlemen, but it is not easy to convince you.
How to rectify the two views? The questioning, struggling, striving mind which never settles for a simple explanation seems always at odds with the mind that relaxes and soaks in the beauty of the moment.