1. If we die, life has no point. Nothing is worth doing.
2. Everything is worth doing, but there is not enough time for it.
The first breeds listlessness and disconnection, and the latter breeds restlessness and impatience and frustration. You cannot read all the books in the library. You cannot know all the things you want to know, or go all the place you want to go, or know all the people you want to know. The list goes on forever.
It seems to me the best way to live is to accept, on the one hand, our condition of existential confusion, while granting that the best scientific evidence points to some form of the survival of our soul, in conditions we really don’t understand, but which to my mind should be amenable to scientific study, and that that sort of scientific study is really by far the most important study any group of intelligent people could undertake.
On the other hand, while we can’t do EVERYTHING, everything we do, we can do better, and that the feelings possible in any moment are in principle similar to those possible in any other moment. You can be happier here, now, where you are, than if you spent the next ten years travelling the world aimlessly, or even in a monastery, studying meditation with people who simply happened to be in the habit of meditation.
When I make a meal, it makes me sad it will quickly be gone. All experience is like this. You have it, then it passes, and you can remember it, but that is not the same; and in remembering, you miss the next moment.
All good living, all true Savoir Vivre, partakes in the ability to simultaneously be present, to grasp, to connect, and then to let go. To my mind, this is the only life skill really worth cultivating.
And it seems to me that all authentic love and generosity and compassion, flows from a spirit which can rest in the flow of life. Manic generosity will benefit people’s bellies, but not their souls. And we humans don’t need so very much, physically. Most of our luxuries are really distractions pointing away, for a time, from our unhappiness.
And it tends to be true that the less our work matters, intrinsically–the more vulnerable it is to obsession.
I am trying to find my own middle point in my own life, my own ability to float in the moment. I have been a carpet for a long time.
And obviously I have the part of me that wants to give up blogging–which insists to me THIS IS THE ONLY WAY–then some more generous part of me says “but it helps you feel and find your way, even if imperfectly, even if only for moments.”
The struggle is real. Obviously. But I will comment that obsessive creation and ideation is not at all the same as compulsive consumption. For good and for bad, much of world, in all ages, was built by people like me, who simply found themselves unable to quit something.