I was very interested in the compelling piece at Kind over Matter last week.
“But what if we found the answer? What if someone came along and gave us a satisfying explanation? What if the mystery were finally solved? What if we asked why, and actually got an answer?”
I don’t think it’s often enough understood that it is not in the answers that meaning is found. It’s in the seeking.
If you get answers you are lucky; perhaps luckier than most, perhaps not so lucky at all.
You will never have all the answers. And that’s a lucky thing as well. If you were to achieve this pinnacle of satisfaction, how long would you stay satisfied? Once a seeker, a traveller, a pilgrim —- you shall always remain such.
The reason I believe that seeking is the purpose, not the answers, is what happens when I meet other seekers.
We bond. We bond as siblings, souls parted at birth, or perhaps even conception.
It matters not what answers we’ve collected as we go along. We pull them out and play with them like marbles. This is my truth, and this one and this one —- can I see yours? And so we show them off to each other, and even when they oppose, like funny little magnets, we do not decide that they must be at war, our two little truths. Not at all. They’re only a curiosity, nothing more.
And perhaps as time skips by us, I will take a great liking to a few of my friend’s truths, and perhaps she to mine, and when we part, we might take a few more with us than when we came, and perhaps leave one or two that broke in the presence of so many other truths.
In every case, we’re richer afterwards than when we started, and in every case, it was not the purity or the breeding of the truths that were important. It was simply the joys of life, and of sharing those joys with others. The truths aren’t the point, they’re simply small tokens, mementos of the journey we’re all on.
[ssbp]
