Weakness is No Excuse

It’s  a tall order, and readily confused with hubris and arrogance, to be committed to the ultimate questions of life and reality. And it would appear that the smartest among us, at their peak performance are the ones to exercise this commitment, while for the rest of us, it is a banner, a philosophical declaration, regarding ‘philosophical’ to mean: nice to say, poetic to pray, but planners and doers are not  invited.

I am here to argue the contrary. And more: weakness is no excuse. One might reason: my mind is not that sharp, my practical life is too stressful, my health is below par — I should be excused from exercising any such commitment to what life and reality are all about.

Alas, relinquishing the strive to understand to its full depth the situation we are in, creates a chain reaction of un-fastening the belt that ties us to the practical matters we think sustain our lives. Apathy — once given a crack, will crawl in, and devour any genuine interest in anything. Under pressure we will sell our dearest values because we are not sure how durable and sustainable they are, not sure because they float on the dark ocean of the underlying meaning of life, which we have given up on. So anything can be anything else, any conclusion can be overturned, every premise we believe in, we may disbelieve in tomorrow. And we typically resolve this confusion by retreating to more basic things.

When you hear people claim: Money is all that matters, the only thing that counts, the one thing I want more off,  the single issue I care about — you hear people that yielded to the sustained pressure of the confusion from the higher-up questions of meaning of life, and  they desperately  hang on to a number — net worth, money in the bank — number!    The property of numbers is that one is either larger than the other, or smaller than the other, or equal to the other — numbers are lined up!   while love, wisdom, fear, death, eternity, infinity, dimensionality, spirituality, poetry, art — are like floating bubbles in a  marsh of chaos.  They don’t surrender to a line up.

And how to withstand the pressure of these many bubbles?  There is only one way that I have come up with so far, and I am quite an old guy, with a long thinking mileage — and that one way is to commit yourself to the ultimate questions: to say, I don’t know what is going on, but, by golly, I am dedicated to finding out, dedicated — despite my disappointing level of wisdom and smarts, despite mental slowness, even fogginess, and through my emotional storms, and regardless of a small or a handicapping physical weakness, and even through a foreboding sense of dying —  I live, I commit — Ultimate Questions you are my target!