Wandering Musings

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about where I’m headed in life. What’s after Japan? (Africa) Am I ever going to settle down? (Doubt it) Will I ever find someone to share the journey with? (???) That should actually be ‘with whom to share the journey.’ Yay for grammar. I’ve always felt behind, somehow, like I’m not where I should be. I know terms like ‘headed,’ ‘behind’ and ’should’ don’t apply when talking about life, and yet, we use them all the time. I was listening to Alan Watts this afternoon. For those of you not familiar with the man, he was a philosopher/theologian in the 60s/70s. I was first introduced to his work in high school, but forgot about him until last year, when I ‘rediscovered’ his ideas, surprised to find that many of them had permeated my own beliefs and the way I see the world. Anyway, here is a quote from one of the talks he gave. It’s not exact (since I was typing it out while listening), but close enough.

“The Japanese have a word, yugen, and they describe yugen as watching wild geese fly and be hidden in the clouds, as watching a ship vanish behind a distant island, as wandering on and on in a great forest with no thought of return… It’s at that moment you’re a perfectly rational human being. You’ve learned purposelessness. All music is purposeless. Is music getting somewhere? If the aim of music, of a symphony, were to get to the final bar, the best conductor would be the one who got there fastest. See, dancing, when you dance, do you aim to arrive at a particular place on the floor? Is that the idea of dancing? The aim of dancing is to dance. It’s exactly the same with our life. We think life has a purpose…. To live I must have faith. I must trust myself to the totally unknown. I must trust myself to a nature which doesn’t have a boss. Because a boss is a system of mistrust. That is why Lao Tzu’s Tao loves and nourishes all things, but does not lord it over them.”

Purposelessness has such a negative connotation, but think how unhappy we would be if everything had to have purpose or meaning. This is one of the reasons I’m so drawn to science. The scientific process devises the how, but not why; through it we can see how everything in the universe is intrinsically interconnected, but not what we should make of such connections. In a world that craves certainty and Truth, science is not well suited (just ask the politicians). But I see certainty as a sort of stagnation, a lie. Really, there’s no such thing.