Hymns of Praise at Dawn

Every morning, I awake and sing hymns of praise to the day, or at least this is my modus operandi. Grateful to be alive and well in this rich and twisted existence, a mix of all the colors that somehow does not blend, most every morning I awake literally smiling at the opportunities of a new day. In other words, it is my nature to relish life. When I wake to find myself down, usually it is because I have strayed from the personal habits that orient me on the path of authentic engagement with life — for me, waking early, thinking, reading, vigorous physical exercise, and obstinate sobriety. These days, I don’t stray; life is simply far too frail, far too precious to squander.

An interesting consequence of this psychological fact about me is that I cannot believe that life is absurd. Put another way: if I am honest with myself (and any meaningful quest for self-knowledge demands honesty from oneself) I cannot not believe that life has meaning; or, put yet another way, that life is meaningless strikes me as an absurdity. This is no proof that life actually is not “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” I have made no argument. I am only reporting a psychological fact about myself: I can doubt the accuracy of my beliefs, but I cannot help but to believe that life has meaning, that there is, as Tolstoy puts it, “a relation between the finite and the infinite.”

The obvious follow-up question is: what is that meaning? I don’t know. Likely I never will, or at least not anytime soon, lost as we are here below. I lose a certain amount of respect for anyone claiming to be a philosopher who also claims to know the meaning of life, or even that there is or is not one. The truth is that, at the end of the day, we are ignorant about such things, so weak is the finite hunk of meat between our ears.

Nevertheless: sense a meaning to life I do, search for it I must, orient myself so as best to receive it I will. If it is all in vain, we’ll never know that either, and probably it is better to live as if life has a meaning, and this, even if one does not know what it is.

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34th Birthday and the Voice of The Ass Kicker

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There is a Crack in Things