It was, as is my habit, an early morning for me. Weekday or weekend, I get up before the sun. I walked to the library of this magnificent place we’re staying in Healdsburg, alone, since most people have the good sense to sleep in late on a Sunday, and I was intent on writing about something which has been on my mind a few days.
The shelves of the library were filled from end to end, and I was drawn to one particular pair of shelves which seemed surprisingly homogenous. On the spine of a book it stated: HARVARD CLASSICS and, beneath that, THE FIVE FOOT SHELF OF BOOKS. There were dozens of them, all numbered and arranged sequentially, with various public domain classics from the past couple hundred years of writing. I suspect someone bought it years ago from one of those Sunday newspaper magazines for folks that wanted to appear erudite by filling their nude shelves with impressive-looking volumes. The capitalized declaration was, for me, more like an intellectual pratfall.
As loathe as I am to add even a single micrometer to the linear reading challenge which humanity apparently faces, I’d like to get it out of my system nonetheless. After all, I’ve always viewed Slope as not just a place for traders to share ideas and experiences but also to learn of other topics. Surely my nearly fourteen years keeping this place propped up has taught me more than school ever did. So let’s get to it.
At the farthest part of my backyard is a swimming pool my wife designed. I consider it perhaps my one big indulgence, since I love going out there during the afternoon and swimming laps. I’ve never liked exercise, but I know I should, and swimming is a great compromise for me, because I find it pleasurable and it helps keep me safely away from weighing 300 pounds.
It is also a contemplative time for me. I’m always been very comfortable with solitude, and swimming back and forth the length of the pool is a repetitive, monotonous, and almost meditative state of being for me. I don’t listen to anything, and I don’t even count the laps, since I just want my brain to do whatever it wants to do. Allowing my mind to wander, if nothing else, relieves the mental discomfort accumulated during the day.
A few days ago, I jumped into the pool, and as I always do, I asked myself, “Well, what should we think about today?” Sometimes it’s something which happened recently, or maybe a product I’m thinking about doing. But on that day I decided to think about God, life, and religion, which is a general area I’ve considered as long as I can remember, and which I’ve written about from time to time here.
For the sake of background, I’ll say that I was raised a good suburban Protestant. The guy who had no trouble changing from the Methodist to the Presbyterian church when his family moved, simply because one or the other church was “better” in the new neighborhood we entered. I went to Sunday School every week. I went on summer mission trips. I was given my Bible when I turned 8 and served as an acolyte. I even sang for a few years as an adult in the church choir. So, as Paul Simon once sang, I was a consecrated boy.
It has been many, many years since I’ve been a regular at church, but thinking about spirituality and our role has never left my brain. This isn’t a serious avocation of mine, but, as much time as I spend inside my own head, there are going to be plenty of opportunities to think about the meaning of life, as it were, and various interpretations of it.
The simple interpretation is that there is no meaning at all. It just so happens that, in this breathtakingly gargantuan universe, the planet Earth had the right circumstances to generate life by sheer chance and that, after all these billions of years, there is this self-aware group of relatively intelligent critters named homo sapiens who are born, live, and then die. There is no before-life. There is no afterlife. There is simply life, and we all do what we can, and we die, and that’s the end of that.
Let me be clear I completely buy in to that possibility. Everything about it makes sense. If you have ever read about the sheer enormity of the universe, which I personally find strikes awe in me to even try to grasp it, you can buy the notion that as unlikely as our presence here is, there was one planet that was going to get it right one of these days, and voila, here we are.
And even if this is the case, we needn’t declare life “meaningless”, simply because there is no possibility of “meaning” anyway, at least none which I can comprehend. What kind of meaning could someone assert? To sing God’s praises? Good Lord, if he’s that bad off, I’d say the Almighty is in need of some serious, serious therapy. So don’t worry about “meaning”. To me, “meaning” is the least important component of finding meaning at all.
There is another extreme, which runs along these lines: there is a Supreme Being, and he created us in his image. We are all, to varying degrees, imperfect forms of that image. We live out our lives as we see fit, but the way in which we live our lives is compared to a strict moral code. If we satisfy the requirements of that code, we are granted eternal life in paradise. If we fail to live as instructed, our souls are condemned to perpetual torment. Heaven and hell. Right and wrong. Redeemed or damned. The dichotomy is taught around the world.
I have a lot of problems with this point of view, and there’s not a particular need to go into them here. And by citing two possible perspectives, I don’t mean to imply there is a tidy continuum which, at one extreme has an absolute humanist atheism and, at the other, a strident theology based on fear. The nature of our place in the universe isn’t defined by a yardstick of beliefs. It’s more like this library I’m sitting in, filled with air in three dimensions, and within this space you could grab any of those air molecules and define it as a philosophy. There are as many nuanced comprehensions of life’s meaning as there are people living it.
But back to my laps in the pool. I was ruminating on the latter of the aforementioned philosophies and considering the role of how medieval classic Christianity is. The most powerful human calling the shots was, of course, the King. He had the wealth, the knowledge, the esteem of others, and the power to destroy those who would defy him. And so the Christian model made Jesus not just the King but the “King of Kings”, the one who could kick your ass farthest down the football field if you screwed up.
So what if it was true that, being born into this world, each of us was basically trying to make Eagle Scout in order to get the big prize at the end of our lives? This doesn’t make sense to me, and I’ll tell you the most important reason for me why it doesn’t: my view is that our nature is largely established at birth. Yes, our environment and the circumstances into which we are born play a part, but I strongly believe that a person’s character, nature, and judgment are established genetically, and that the nature of a 40 year old is very close to his nature as a baby, even though as an infant he lacked the ability to express or act upon his will. Over time, he simply grows into potency, given his newfound abilities to walk, speak, write, and otherwise act upon the world.
If this is true, then how on earth would it be decent for people to be rewarded or punished based upon the nature which was an innate part of their being at birth? We have no say in the matter, and although, as already mentioned, our good or bad circumstances during our lives will mold, shape, and perhaps even pervert that original nature, I believe it most cases it remains immutable. Thus, why should some poor sap with poor judgment, relatively low intelligence, and an impoverished upbringing have to suffer for his ill fate? And why should someone like me, who has had so many lucky circumstances in his life, benefit? I don’t deserve benefit or redemption any more than the other chap deserves condemnation.
And then, taking a breath, a different possibility altogether hit me: what if we’ve had the roles backward all this time? What if, instead of God as the teacher and we as the students, it is US who are, in fact, the teachers? What if he is in the role of looking to us for lessons, guidance, and wisdom?
And that, in a flash, made much more sense to me.
Consider a universe in which there was an overarching and self-aware intelligence. This force was a creative one, both in a physical and spiritual sense, and for our purposes of comprehension, we anthropomorphize this entity with simple terms like “he” and “God”. But accept for the moment that there has been a force which, in our own language, we consider to be creative, intelligent, and even emotional.
Let us further suppose this force is, by its nature, always in the act of creation. Whether those creations be inanimate (boulders, sun flares, comets), animate (an Asian lily, a maple leaf), or sentient (a tiger, your dog, or a favorite Uncle), they all serve dual roles. One role is that of expression. There is beauty and elegance in these forms. We, as humans, have the most incomprehensibly minute means to understand what is around us, limited by both our perspective and our senses, but we can still have our breath taken away if we drink in deeply enough what we can witness.
Yet beyond this, these creations themselves have their own ability to create and express. My sitting here typing these words is a form of that expression. Your reading of these words, and your own interpretation of them, and actions from them, is likewise an expression.
And so, in our lives, we do right and wrong. We fight. We kill. We teach. We have arguments and reconciliations. We build up and destroy. We learn and we forget. Because this is complicated stuff. The seemingly infinite variety of life out there, and the likewise infinite possibilities of interactions among and between those life forms, makes for quite an interesting bouillabaisse of possibilities, wouldn’t you say? And who is learning, growing, and comprehending from all of this? I would say the Source of all of this creation in the first place.
So instead of the old model of humans getting cranked out to scurry around, trying to adhere to a codification of rules (the content of which no two cultures can really seem to agree upon) that will result in ecstacy or torment, I would suggest instead the possibility of a nobler purpose. And that is our existence is that of instructor, teacher, and experimenter. It’s the big guy upstairs learning from us, not the other way around.
And if that’s the case, isn’t that an awfully optimistic view of it all? (Which, I confess, is ironic, coming from the likes of me). That is, an overarching force of life and creation which, through the ages, is slowly, clumsily, but at least steadfastly, moving toward greater understanding and wisdom, all through the course of an act of Self-Contemplation whose scale and longevity is impossible for us to appreciate?
Your existence, therefore, could not have a nobler purpose. You are part of life’s contemplation of itself. You are part of the body of wisdom of what all life can comprehend. In that FIVE FOOT SHELF OF BOOKS, your life is an important additional page. Hard as it is, sometimes, that could be why we’re here. You and me both.
It’s just a thought.
