Existential Conundrum

Freedom is a heavy load, a great burden for any spirit to undertake. It is not a right granted without cost, but a choice made, and the choice made may be a hard one, a costly one. The way forward winds ever upward towards the light, but the laden traveler has no chance of reaching it, nor can he. We may only approach the unattainable truth through a succession of approximations and errors. That is all.

Along the way, affliction comes to each of us - not to make us sad, but to make us sober; not to make us sorry, but to make us wiser. Each generation, in turn, imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that came before, and wiser than the one that followed, yet science continues to gather information faster than any of us gathers wisdom.

The greatest error a thinking person can make is to believe that one particular version of history is absolute fact. History is recorded by a series of observers with limited perspective, none of whom are impartial. The world has always been and will always be about continual and inevitable change. No sensible decision can be made without taking into account not only the way that the world is, but the way that the world will be.

Man is an unnatural animal, a rebel child of nature. More and more does he turn against the hand that nutured him. It doesn't matter what you do, as long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it to something that is like you after you take your hands away. That's the rub. In the end, we are each ultimately required to go against our own nature, no matter who we are. It's a basic tenet of life to seek to violate our own identity. At some point, each of us must do so. It's the ultimate price of living in the world – to overcome and defeat creation; it is cursed work, an unavoidable curse that nags at all life everywhere in the universe.