22 September 2017
Welcome to autumn! Today is the autumnal equinox. 'Tis the season for colored leaves, grain harvest, and packing away your shorts. I wrote a little post on the spring equinox earlier this year, so it feels appropriate to do a post on the autumnal equinox for conceptual symmetry.
What does autumn mean? It means harvest, for starters. Civilization itself was built on agriculture. No grain fields, no iPhones. The bulk of the year's calories came from this time right now. So autumn is time to cash in your karmas, so to speak: did you plant well and tend your crop? Good harvest. Did the opposite? You get the same. Autumn is the time at which we are reminded, literally and metaphorically, that you reap what you sow.
It is a sobering thought and an important guiding principle. And I mean, this isn't a hard-and-fast rule in the sense that weather patterns are out of our hands. Drought or heavy rains at the wrong time will impact everybody's yield, so it's not like the best farmers get exempt from that. Or does that deepen the metaphor and wrap it in another layer?
With the advent of the atomic bomb and the computer, "traditional" lifestyles became "transitional" lifestyles. And I say this in the sense of a transitional species. Those two inventions changed the game. They redefined what it means to be human, and—it is not exactly clear what that is yet, but it does involve a digitally-connected world and an ever-present potential for the species to blow itself to smithereens.
So the question is, who can succeed in this type of world, with these rules? Who will survive? Some underlying portion of our global psychology, I think, is an anxiety about the sensation of change. We don't know what the world will look like in ten years. The iPhone is now ten years old, and smartphones caused a paradigm shift in industries as diverse as personal computers, media, finance, journalism, taxis, and many more. But five thousand years ago? You could bet an entire herd of goats that in a decade things would look basically the same; and you'd probably end up with two herds of goats, if you found someone crazy enough to take you up on that wager.
So there is a very real sense in which change is happening at a faster rate than ever before. And who is steering this thing, anyway?
And this is where the extreme-weather layer of our metaphor comes back into play: if we are metaphorically farmers, our crop is meaning. The tenuousness of our world, its unpredictably, its chaotic vacillation is a metaphysical drought on our crop. It impacts global yield of meaning, which is the most important food of all. To paraphrase Nietzsche, humans can abide pain but not meaningless pain. Who will succeed in this world? Those of us who can find meaning in this crazy existence.
And God said, "Let Us make living creatures out of mud, so the mud can see what We have done." And God created every living creature that now moveth, and one was man. Mud as man alone could speak. God leaned close to mud as man sat up, looked around, and spoke. Man blinked. "What is the purpose of all this?" he asked politely.
"Everything must have a purpose?" asked God.
"Certainly," said man.
"Then I leave it to you to think of one for all this," said God.
What is the meaning of Life? Perhaps the question contains a false premise to begin with. Can anything so vast and multiplicitous have a singular meaning? Or could the process itself of exploring, experiencing, and dialoguing be the meaning; and never any sentence be created that is the final answer, including this one, instead forever dancing around some unnameable Truth that perpetually binds the world around itself in its gravity?
Hold the line: Winter is coming, but we still have an abundance of grain for harvest. Take a moment for yourself to reflect on where you find significance, on what is most important to you. Chase that feeling. It will get us through the tumultuous times, and our communities will flourish in fulfillment.
May we turn our passing illuminations into an abiding light.
Peace be with us all.
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