Blast From the Past: Metaphysical Musings

Today I was going through my rambling journals, searching for notes I had made at one point for a story I have started writing.  I was looking in all the wrong places, and as I did I came across several musings that I had written down at one point.  Though the quality of the writing is rather nebulous, I am glad that I found them, because they include thoughts that I’m glad to come back to.

For example, an excerpt from volume 11, p. 51:

“The self is the eternal mystery.  Everything we do, the questions we ask, the things we look for, all of them in some way lead back to us trying to explain who and what we are.  We are ghosts with no pasts…struggling to figure out who put us here and why.  The self is that which seeks desperately for purpose, something to distract from the yawning uncertainty that touches all of us.  After all, while there is a neatly spinning world full of things we know, it spins through a universe whirling with things we can never be sure of.  We are the largest mystery, and despite that or perhaps because of it, we cannot abide mysteries.”

Now, I am my own critic in reading back over this—the voice is a bit pretentious, and the wording rather obscure in places.  But there’s a few interesting ideas in there.  I wrote this, by the way, in January of 2010, at which time I was taking a seminar about creativity.  Professor Larson encouraged us to ask questions that had no answers, to adventure into ideas where we had no right to be and start poking around.  The above excerpt was one result of this experimental period.

Creativity, I believe, rises out of a wish to explain oneself and one’s world.  We make up stories—or paint or build things, or pretend to be other people, or however we choose to follow a dream—so that we can learn more about the world and our own place in it.  Faith isn’t the only thing that can tell us why we are here, though it does attack the bigger question.  For me, though, the answer to the little question—why I, personally, am here in this world—is my writing, and my music, and the understanding of myself that these things give me.  By understanding myself, I can understand others, at least a little bit.

But it’s not enough to write one thing.  Though it’s been said, many times many ways: it’s not the destination, but the journey.  It’s not the answer, but the asking.  The simple fact that we are trying to figure out a mystery beats back the terror of not knowing.          

Pretty hefty metaphysical stuff for a Saturday afternoon.  Sometimes, though, you have to wonder about these things.  “What is the ultimate truth about ourselves?” Sir Arthur Eddington once asked.  He offers a few answers, and then says, “There is one elementary inescapable answer.  We are that which asks the question.”