Getting Personal

(excerpt from Lenses, a book-length collection of essays in search of a publisher)

Getting Personal
Sometimes inspiration isn't a matter of stimulating new ideas, so much as confirming and clarifying thoughts considered earlier. In my eclectic reading, I sometimes stumble on a passage that feels right, not as a discovery of something new, but rather as a clear and cogent expression of what I believed before, and that stimulates me to take that thought in a new direction.
Such was the case with a passage from Boethius, who wrote in the sixth century. In prison, awaiting execution at the random whim of King Theodoric of Italy, Boethius tried to make sense of life. He concluded that infinity, eternity, and chance reduce everything we might do to insignificance.
The endeavor to try to understand the nature of everything is unending. That is just another aspect of infinity/eternity — no single breakthrough, no individual contribution matters in the long run, because the process of discovery never ends. There's never a moment when the answer is found. Every answer gives rise to new questions, which lead to new insights.
Yes, part of why we exist, presuming there is a why, must be to participate in trying to make the world a better place than we found it, in trying to advance knowledge, or in trying to help those who might some day do so.
But another important role, one which becomes all the more important the older we get, is striving to make personal sense of the world we live in and our role in it. I will never understand the absolute nature of anything, but I can arrive at a personal understanding — building context through reading and experience, making personal mind maps to help me recognize relationships and interconnections, arriving at personal answers to the big questions, answers that help me deal with day-to-day reality and to arrive at a sense of fulfillment, so that the ordinary tasks and challenges of life make sense to me in a self-built context.
From this personal perspective, infinity and eternity are positive, not negative. Every moment in time is in the middle of all time, just as every point in space is in the middle of all of space.
I, just like everyone who has ever lived, stand at the center of the universe. So I strive to find truth and meaning within the fabric and context of my life.
In practical terms, this means that I need not read and strive to understand everything written by great thinkers. Rather I read authors whose works resonate with me, whose thoughts stimulate follow-on thoughts of my own.
I'm on a personal quest to try to understand what matters to me as an individual, living here and now.