Some days it’s hard to ignore the culture wars that shoot back and forth viciously on digital threads or the hurried whispers of people who feel the uncomfortable cultural shift beneath their feet. I wonder whether we’re just living through especially tumultuous times or whether this has always been so? It has always been so, of course, because nature is change. Even the universe changes from moment to moment. It’s a truth some try to resist and others embrace. Often, we embrace it when young and ossify with age. That’s our nature too. Today’s passionate culture warriors become tomorrow’s slow-moving dinosaurs.
I’ve always thought it unwise to commit too fully to a rigid set of beliefs. This is not to say belief systems are unreasonable or bad – humans seek meaning in all areas, and belief provides the framework for living in a universe that’s so vast as to cause us terror in dark and quiet moments – if you subscribe to Terror Management Theory. We cling to each other for warmth, just as we cling to belief like a security blanket.
We so often make the mistake of assuming our own beliefs are real and true and that they transcend time. Rather than understanding others deeply and cultivating compassion, we too easily find the beliefs of another person wrong, placing it on a rigid moral spectrum that functions as our own personal guide to undertsanding a seemingly random existence we seek desperately to understand, contain, and explain. In this way, we comfort ourselves.
If we believe the universe has a moral structure inherent, we also tend to find a moral structure in the world and find our beliefs aligning strongly with it. If we believe the universe is mechanistic and chaotic, without moral structure, we align our personal narratives to this view instead. We find that life’s purpose and meaning is tied inextricably to our most basic beliefs about reality. We may be trapped within them at the expense of understanding other people. Either we’re islands of meaning, separated by uncrossable gulfs, or human beings attached to each other by common bonds. Perhaps both.
You don’t want to be on the wrong side of history, people sometimes say. For me, there is no right or wrong side, just people who have their own personal narratives, clinging to meaning. We’re all in the vast river of history together. It flows all around us. We’re part of the change happening from moment to moment, whether we embrace it or resist it. Neither approach is right or wrong – just ways of living and surviving and finding purpose and meaning.
I love geology and astronomy. I like the feeling of placing myself in the context of deep time – the kind of time that barely notices our existence because we’re fresh and new. In this way, I place human life in the context of more ancient things. Uluru, the famed monolithic red rocky heart of Australia, started to form 550 million years ago. It was here long before we were. It started to form when multicellular life dominated the planet, long before dinosaurs roamed. Imagine that?
When you look up at the stars, those photons hitting your retina have travelled for countless light years. They’ve struggled and twisted up through impossibly dense super-heated layers of distant suns – the forges of our universe – careened through the cold depths of deep space, entered your eye, hit your retina, and then been processed as a visual signal by your amazing mammalian brain. In this way, we’re all connected to the stars. I love that thought.
The Rusty Ruin Journal 