creativity

We begin our lives satisfying physical and material desires. But eventually most of us will begin an ancient journey searching for Meaning. The first is material, while the second is immaterial—or spiritual. Brian McLaren describes the material quest as “boiling down to earning and buying and selling…eating and drinking and having fun…respiration, digestion, elimination, ovulation, ejaculation, gestation, reproduction, antiquation, expiration.”¹ The search for Meaning cannot be so easily described.

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Life is a struggle. It is a pursuit of needs and wants and the avoidance of pain, injury and death. It is joy in accomplishment and in the presence of loved ones, and it is disappointment in failure and loss. But life is continuing to live in spite of all. In fact, we might define life for conscious beings as choosing to live and to thrive nonetheless.

The creative struggle of the human animal is, in the least, the struggle to carve out a niche to survive in on the shear cliffs of human consciousness overlooking the black abyss of nothingness. Some are more “creative” than the rest of us, but each of us faces the unforgiving world of surprising challenge, and, most importantly, we are conscious or it. We are not merely following a program to procreate, as some would have us accept. It is this consciousness—this knowledge of Good and Evil—that makes us so sorely aware of the toils and pains that life brings our way even as we strive to engage life.

continue reading "Carry On Nonetheless, and The Meaning of Life"