let further work out experience…
last night I finally got a new computer…
a dell… for about half of what it usually costs…
and it was fairly highly rated…
so, I was up until 1:00 trying to get it going…
I had forgotten how many updates they make you go through, to
get it set up…now all that time, about 2 or 2:30 hours, spent
trying to get this thing ready for use… that is experience…
was there any meaning or purpose in all that waiting… that experience?
I certainly can’t see it…it was just boring, waiting for updates to work
themselves out…
making sure the computer protection was working and getting ITunes online…
necessary stuff but there was no meaning or purpose except to get the computer
going… nothing big… but perhaps that is the point… how much of our experience
is really going to “big stuff”…How much that happens really means anything?
I go to work and stand around for 8 hours and that is experience, but most of it
is just killing time until I can go home… the trick to is to discover what
experiences are really something to understand and which are just crap…
the vast majority of life is simply crap… wasted time… waiting for something
or someone… standing in some god awful line yet again…
how much of much of my life has been something significant?
very little…I can probably count on one hand the moments that
were meaningful or had some life purpose meaning to it…
perhaps, that is the meaning or purpose of life…
to have more of those meaningful or significant moments?
some moments are joyful and some are so horrible that they drop
us to our knees in pain…how many moment of those have you had?
perhaps the question is, how do we bring back meaning or significance
into our lives… is it moment to moment or do we need to
see the full sweep of our lives to finally understand its meaning or significance?
can we hang our hat on the significance of our lives on one or two moments?
what events or experiences can we say actually gave our lives some meaning or
purpose?
look at this from an individual standpoint AND a communal, community,
social aspect…
is our lives meaning best found in individual moments/experiences or
is it best found, shared with one or more people?
the Greeks thought that we discover who we are in a community,
not individually… the making of a human being is best done in
a society, a community…now in your life, which has been true…
did you discovered yourself individually or did you discover yourself
socially, in a group, in a community?
for most of us, we learned who we are in groups socially or
in a community… I believe the Greeks are right…
which is why I believe the GOP attack on community is wrong…
it is in our response to other humans that we find out who we are and
what is our meaning/purpose…
can Robinson Crusoe find his meaning/purpose all alone on that island?
No, he cannot…he needs and we need people, community to discover
what is our meaning/purpose… it is through our response to
events/experiences in regards to other people that we learn who we are…
life is a communal event/experience…
so in our experiences can we find meaning/purpose?
or do we have meaning/purpose giving us the results of our
experiences?
which comes first, meaning/purpose or events/experiences?
Kropotkin