Existence and Purpose
What is it that we are about here?
Journal: 24 August, 2024, morning.
How difficult it is to understand other people, even other people we like, even other people we love.
We are all our own universes, recognizable to each other mostly, yet alien. We don’t know what is hidden beneath our exteriors, what unseen complexities, what muddled feelings, unexpressed.
Although there are hints.
I think about the people who seemingly have no filters, who casually express the most alarming things: the very young, the very old, the mentally unwell, the ones who have been damaged by life, or birth. I think about the people who are seemingly none of those I just mentioned and yet astonish us by their casual expression of the most alarming things.
The ones who have lost (or never had) any desire to care. The ones of us who very specifically define their caring. A truth: the two categories are all of us. All of us.
We all want what we want and it is contrary to that to put other people’s interests before our own. I sometimes wonder if sacrifice is only prettily wrapped self interest, serving us in some unseen way. There is a theory about that.
We choose to serve specific interests at the expense of other specific interests. Everything cannot be had, and it is interesting, is it not, the ones we choose and the ones we reject and our rationalization of that?
All that we do serves our own selves in some way, though that may be hidden from even our own selves. Even wanting to be “good,” how do we manage to weigh all the competing “goods” and decide on the “good” we will act out? Short terms are problematic and we live in the short term, unavoidably.
Reading this, it sounds disjointed, random, though I think “No, not really. I’m circling around a central thought, or more, a central question, and always I am led back to the question of existence and purpose.” There really is no answer to that question except the one I fashion for myself, and that takes me neatly back to the first sentence I wrote here, doesn’t it?
We all do harm to others. Everything is so unavoidably connected that we simply cannot avoid it. How do we choose? How do we live with our choices? Can we ever understand other people’s choices?
Can we live with not understanding?
#journalingalife