One Shot, One Life

The search for meaning goes on and on . . .

YOU HAVE TO KEEP AT IT, AGAIN AND AGAIN, THROUGHOUT YOUR LIFE.

From the moment you start dreaming as a teenager, start delving into philosophy and following artists, sense a first hint of awe at your existence and wonder if life has any meaning at all.

Riddles wrapped in enigmas wrapped in mysteries. What the hell happened before the Big Bang? Does AI totally vanquish the idea of a human soul? And who is this "I" asking all these things, anyway?

You'll keep asking questions like that ... again and again and again.

In my late teens I thought I'd found some answers in Wittgenstein . . . and then in Sartre & Heidegger . . . and later in Shinto's mystical embrace of nature . . . and in the films of Ozu and the nothingness of Zen. The artist Agnes Martin once hit me hard with: "I am staying unsettled and trying not to talk for three years. I want to do it very much."

Many decades later, strolling through a graveyard in Australia, I came across John Molloy, a Lieutenant Colonel in Her Majesty's army, who fought under Wellington at Rolica, Salamanca and the Pyrenees, and died on 8th of October 1867 aged 87 years. His epitaph read:

I HAVE FOUGHT THE GOOD FIGHT

I HAVE FINISHED MY COURSE

I HAVE KEPT THE FAITH

Yes, yes, you too will have breakthrough moments that will leave their imprint on you forever. You'll get hints, little shifts and subplots that make you feel like you're creeping up on something big and true, like finally you have it, you're almost there . . .

Yes, yes, like in a dream, your search will go on.

And when you hit 80, maybe you'll hear an old Dylan song and feel something stirring deep inside you. And one morning you'll wander out on your veranda and see hummingbirds playing jazz around your flower plots, and your heart will soar and you'll feel a giddy sense of oneness with the world.

But then slowly, you'll lose your mind. Or at least that's what it'll feel like as you're lying there staring at the ceiling, in the company of dead sages whose words have meant so much to you, speaking to you all at once now:

ONE SHOT, ONE LIFE.
Sesshu

BACK TO THE ROUGH GROUND!
Wittgenstein

I AM BECAUSE WE ARE.
African Ubuntu saying

EXISTENCE IS A FREE GIFT FROM THE SUN.
Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen

KALLE, BE A MAN.
My mother on my 13th birthday.

STOP TRYING.
Lao Tsu