When I think about what brings meaning to my life, what makes life meaningful, often for me it comes back to this idea of exploration.
Because the basic fact as I see it is just that life is a mystery.
Everything around us, the whole universe, the fact that anything exists at all, is just such a fundamental mystery.
And for some reason, I have curiosity about it, just a desire to know what’s going on yeah.
Maybe it’s beyond any of us to have some kind of fundamental answer, but even to get some clue as to what’s going on with the universe, what’s behind what’s happening.
Now many people believe that they have this answer figured out, people that believe in some kind of religion or some kind of belief about what’s right and the way things are, whether a traditional religion, or some kind of political view, or some kind of personal philosophy that can kind of explain everything.
But I don’t have that.
I don’t have a system that explains everything.
To me it’s still a great unknown.
And even for a lot of people with a system, there’s still so many things that are unknown.
So why do I have curiosity?
I don’t know.
Maybe it’s just part of having a mind, part of having awareness.
The fact that we have some kind of senses, and we can perceive some of what’s going on around us, and we can think about it, just leads to this desire to try to make sense of it and try to understand what’s happening.
So maybe it is just a natural consequence of being human that we have some kind of curiosity, although it can be expressed in many different ways.
We can focus on different things that we can be curious about.
We can be curious about the outer reaches of outer space.
We can be curious about humans ourselves and how we behave and how we interact.
But all of that is all part of the great mystery that we’re part of.
So no matter what else happens in life, and no matter what else is going on, it does seem to…
that mystery is always there, and it’s something that we can always be looking into, and always be wondering, what is the next layer?
So imagine, when we’re babies, everything is kind of like a mystery.
We’re just kind of figuring it out.
But then at some point when we get older, we’re taught by the adults the way things are, and then we eventually reach the point where, oh, I kind of basically know the way things are, and we sort of reach a level where we’re comfortable, and it’s it’s easy for the everyday responsibilities of life to take over and displace that basic mystery.
But no matter how well established we are, how well studied we are, how much we know, how much experience we have, we still only have a very tiny bit of the great mystery.
And so it’s always out there.
And I think if I get bored, if I ever get bored by the way my life’s going, it’s just because I’ve let that fundamental mystery slip from my mind.
I’ve lost focus on it.
But ultimately, the mystery of why we’re here at all, and what the universe is “about”, if anything, and what else is going on: that mystery is there for us forever.
And whatever else happens, we’ll always have that adventure, you could say, of discovering any little piece of the great mystery of life and the universe.
And just being a part of that makes me happy to have a chance to experience this life.
#mystery #universe #exploration