The Meaning of Life

When I was a small kid, I used to lie awake at night sometimes and wonder what was lurking in the closet or under the bed.  Sometimes the suspense would get to be too much for me, and I'd leap out of bed and slap at the light switch to flood the room with incandescent light.  Of course, I never caught any creatures this way, but it wasn't until years later that I found out the scientific reason why I didn't.  It seems that a dude named Heisenberg figured out that the very act of looking at something alters whatever it is that you're looking at, so there's no way to tell whether there were monsters in there before I turned on the light.

Now that I'm an adult, I still lie awake at night sometimes, and I'm still careful to shut the closet door before getting into bed.  Nor do I permit my arms or legs to dangle over the side of the bed once I'm in there... just in case.  But I'm nowhere near as nervous about the unknown as I used to be when I was a kid, because all the empirical evidence I amassed over those Wonder Years ultimately allowed me to internalize that it doesn't matter whether there are monsters in the dark or not-- incandescent light is fatal to them, if there are.  (Although now we're supposed to be switching to fluorescent bulbs.  I think that kind of light should work, too, but maybe I should do a formal study to make sure before I run out of incandescent bulbs, just in case.)

Besides, somewhere along the long, tortuous path to adulthood I developed a new set of worries.  Not only are the faceless, shapeless monsters in the dark less scary than the documented wackadoos on the front page of the paper and the 6 o'clock news,  I've been wondering about the Meaning of Life.  In particular, I've been wondering if there is one. 

I've noticed that all the truly happy people that I know adhere to the philosophy of "living in the moment."  One wise woman told me that "the Meaning of Life is Life."  In other words, don't worry about the "why" of it at all, because now that you are alive, it doen't matter how you got here, or where (if anywhere) you're headed after this.  There's a lot of sense in that approach to the problem.  In fact, I think that's pretty much how cats and dogs live.

Human beings can never seem to leave well enough alone, though, and so a few billion of us around the world have fallen, to one degree or another, under the spell of something called "religion."  In Western countries, but particularly in the U.S., there is also a large and probably growing group who call themselves "spiritual, but not religious."  Near as I can tell, this means "I used to go to church... or synagogue... or temple... or the mosque... when I was a kid, but not anymore."  Personally, I had my childhood indoctrination in the Catholic church.  But I can truthfully say, without either shame or pride, that I haven't seen the inside of one of those places, except for the occasional wedding or funeral or trip to my Mom's, for longer than some of you have been alive.  I'm spiritual, though.

Getting religion can remove the uncertainty of those unanswerable questions that you might otherwise ask yourself in the middle of the night, because religion is all about providing answers to the unanswerable, even if the answers are simply made up.  All you've got to do is believe, and then you're set.  My Mom is a devout Catholic, and has often told me that she prays regularly that I will receive the "gift of faith."  And I appreciate the thought, I really do, because if I could really believe in anything, the way she's talking about, I'd automatically have answers to all of those questions and maybe I'd finally be able to get a good night's sleep.

And it wouldn't necessarily have to be Catholicism, either.  It could be Islam, or the Old Religion ("witchcraft" to you and me) or anything, even "secular humanism."  Anything to turn off the wondering.

It doesn't simplify things to think that all the different religions can't possibly be right because they're fundamentally different from each other, or even internally inconsistent.  What if "our thoughts create our reality," as Louise Haye might say?  Maybe everything is relative, and whatever we believe is real is real.  That would certainly explain how both Newton and Einstein could be right.  Heck, maybe some people really did come from nowhere, and will blink out like a lightbulb when their Final Switch is flipped.  Maybe others wind up floating on clouds, strumming harps and wearing choir robes and sandals.  And maybe somewhere there is a giant Gentlemen's Club in the sky, too, where explosives-singed martyrs are entertained endlessly by a parade of virgins.  Or maybe we just go back to the foot of the line, reincarnated as goats or chickens or chupacabras or something.

Sometimes people find faith out of the blue, when something scary or unnatural happens to them.  St. Paul, for example, was a heartless tax collector until one day he fell off his ass and was struck blind.  After hearing the Voice of Jesus, he received the "gift of faith" and his sight was restored and he began preaching the Gospel and... well, I can't remember whether he got himself martyred or not, but however and whenever he ultimately checked out I'm sure he never again laid awake at night wondering what would happen when he did.

Maybe something like that will happen to me one day.  In the meantime, I'm going to try to think happy thoughts, be nice to goats and chickens, and live life one beer at a time.