I stopped searching for life's answers and accidentally found all of them
A Life Only Considered Isn't One Lived
I have spent most of my life agonizing over how I ought to spend the time that makes it up. Without realizing it, the time I've spent thinking about how to spend my time has, recursively, become the very way in which I've spent my time.
The most cynical interpretation of this realization would reduce my life down to a purely theoretical notion - a life marked by all of the actions only considered and never performed. On my worst days I may allow myself to lament my time spent in consideration, but because time is indeed finite and the ways to spend it are abundant, I maintain the justification.
Answer Derivation > The Answer
However worthy an endeavor I tell myself it has been, my search for a life's justification has led to countless answers offering only momentary relief. The persistent wave of disappointment a relief unsustained imparts, has most surely inspired the resentment I have come to hold for the library of self-help books overwhelming my bookshelf and the playlist of YouTube videos I have saved to "Watch Later", with good intention.
They were the assumed object of my salvation.
The promise of answers advertised in books and in videos is as alluring a proposition as one could be to someone as undefined as me. The trouble is, an answer means very little if no work was done to attain it.
Arriving without travel comes at the cost of the journey.
Conversational fluency in an idea is forfeited when an idea is given, as the articulation of an idea exists on the other end of one's time spent grappling with it.
The Root
It is with this understanding have I come to realize, never should the answer have been the point. The point, as I have found it to be, is something much less specific and much more flexible. It is what I am, perhaps overconfidently, acknowledging as the root by which every answer may ultimately be derived.
Now, the reveal of something I purport as so profound may demand more tension than I am able to inspire. A grand entrance for which I unfortunately lack the ability to make. So, with limited fanfare, it is with much relief, I have found the point to be, quite simply, a fluency in oneself.
A Liberating Extinction
Unmeasurable time believing in, and searching for the thing I have just reasoned out of existence has already been spent, ironically in pursuit of the very thing that is now extinct.
My search for an answer led to its very extinction.
This is admittedly an unsatisfying conclusion, but, thankfully, the absence of this answer is not without liberation.
You see, when there is nothing that exists to be found, you are free to stop looking.
Energy, no longer imprisoned by a fruitless pursuit, is now free to be applied to a point with infinite and certain accommodation.
You are the point.
You are the only point.
There is nothing else.
Every answer to every question you have ever had, and all of the ones you have yet to ask, complete with a conviction in them unbridled by doubt, exist on the other end of knowing yourself.
I am unsure of any pursuit more noble and more certain to yield than the pursuit of yourself.
Exercising Pursuit
It is almost poetic this universal point, as simple as it is, to be derived by an exercise equal in simplicity. It is so simple, in fact, I find myself struggling to offer any tactical recommendation with which to apply it.
So, as best as I can put together, to pursue yourself, is as simple a task as thinking of yourself - analyzing, reflecting, and wondering.
That is all - a redirection of focus from everyone and everything else, back onto, and only onto, you.
This reinforces the disproportionate value I have come to assign to internal revelations over ones externally adopted. For something to even be denotatively revelatory requires drama and theatrics from the disclosure of the revelation itself. Any external revelation, while perhaps compelling upon initial observation, is unique to the advocate's lived experience, not yours. It is foolish, then, to adopt a salve that addresses the specific context of someone else's life and assume commensurate salvation when applied to your own. The allure is compelling, but in the time spent understanding someone else's relief, you may find what you adopt to be far from lasting.
An Unattainable Fluency
Fluency in myself is far from complete, but it comes with great satisfaction that I am able to express meaningful progress in its pursuit.
I attribute much of the progress to having found a satisfying mode of self-exploration that endures. Developing an understanding would not be possible if it was not something from which I derived an intrinsic satisfaction from. Too, sustainability would be unachievable if my mode were not something I could reasonably expect to continue into the future with a confident regard.
- Which actions are defined by their low barriers to entry?
- Which actions have an intellectual elasticity that will expand and compress to the variable articulation I am able to meet myself with?
- Which actions are most liable to endure?
No activity has revealed more of me to myself than writing. Lying in this artifact, as I should like to call it, is a time capsule that holds the level to which I understand myself and the world that orbits me at this moment.
A moment, through words, now captured in time, faithfully preserved.
It is the clarity that exists on the other end of working to understand, from which I find this tremendous satisfaction, but it is the possibility of revisiting this entry in the future and gauging my future-past's understanding of the world against my new future-present's, hopefully, evolved one, that adds an extra dimension of durability to this pursuit. A type of thrill.
Through this entry and all of the ones I may write am I beginning to establish a fluency in myself. Though I don't believe complete fluency will ever possibly be achieved, I am relieved to have found, in the pursuit of it, an infinite well from which purpose and fulfillment seem likely to be, with an equal infinity, derived.