Just Existence Embraced

My last post consists of six words: "Yes and not.  Three letters each."  That is my awkward way to introduce what I imagine is the simplest and most inescapable implication of "roused, readied, reaped":

We do not live in an experience of symmetry.  We are born, we are molded, and we die.  We are dipped into--one might even say we glance off of--such reality as we believe exists outside of ourselves (and even that is to credit our sense of "ourselves" with a reality commensurate with our conceit about its permanence and importance.)

To say "yes and not" about our lives, rather than the symmetrical "yes or no" that we apply to any binary happenstance, is to attempt to verbalize our situation in the most salient manner.  We would, in general, prefer to obtain answers about our concerns (yes's or no's), rather than to seek answers to our concerns and receive what--arguably--we deserve: silence.  Sometimes the answer to our concerns is neither yes nor no (or any more complex response) but is simply nothing.

We are not symmetrical beings, and we do not live symmetrical lives.  I will grant that the word "symmetrical" might be clumsy in this instance, but I think it will suffice.  We careen through our lives, and we careen into the uncertainty of death.  On the face of it, of course, neither a humanistic nor a theistic worldview would militate necessarily against this contention of asymmetry.  We have expended lifetimes and generations and millennia bemoaning the pitiful, limited understanding of humans, but our realization of our state in this regard contains almost always the germ of our most crucial self-deception: we grasp typically at the notion that our existences should "make sense" or "have meaning."

To this notion of meaningfulness--this attempt to right the ship of our heaving and battered understandings--the answer from humans has sometimes been, "Why?  Why should existence make sense in reference to the individual, or in reference to any corporate entity in which the individual might possess membership?"  But what then?

To take the experience of perceived meaninglessness to the extreme, one might imagine the perceiving individual collapsing as an unmotivated and unstimulated pile of flesh.  Of course that doesn't happen.  And as we conceive of ourselves, the problem of meaning versus meaninglessness persists, even as we persist.  (The reader is free to postulate an entirely emotionless and relaxed composure in some suicide committing the act as a response to life's meaninglessness, but if we can pretend that such a person could be "an unmotivated and unstimulated pile of flesh," then we might as well concede that no discussion of shared emotional experiences in humanity has standing against any participant's fancy about what a person might think or feel in a situation.)

And yet we do have a shared experience of meaninglessness.  We were all born.  We grasped for what mattered to us before we knew what mattered to us.  As infants and children we sometimes got what we wanted, and we sometimes were confronted not with yes's or no's or explanations but rather with--nothing.  We got yes's and not's.  Of course questions and concerns come faster to children than their little lives can contain them--and so children hope to grow up "to understand someday"--or are at least told that they "will understand someday."

This is wrong--at least insofar as we as adults internalize such admonitions.  We should not spend our adult lives on binary "yes's and no's" (or even on explanations.)  We should not spend our adult lives seeking understanding, seeking answers.  The crux of my statement is the word "spend," which implies an undertaking or an investment.  It is foolish to attach an idea of expenditure to the search for meaning, since that grasping--no matter how elevated or base--is the default state of humanity.  Our proper undertaking--as especially I see in the teachings of Jesus--is one characterized by the scraping away of the notion of "meaning," an action essential to the working-out of the statement with which I concluded my last post but one:

'The miracle is existence.  The truth is the fact that we ourselves exist.  The faith is a sincere response to truth."

No "meaning," just existence embraced.