Key West The Newspaper

by Kirby Congdon…….

John Donnelly asks in response to last week’s thoughts on God, where does our consciousness come from when we consider abstract ideas about being human beings.

Oh, this correspondent, in reply to John, has all the answers of course! We are just waiting for Columbia University to establish their new center for the study of the brain to verify this essayist’s speculations! If we had all the answers to all the questions would the quality of life be dismissed? Indeed, almost all of the organized religions have promised as much and the adherents to such security come off to the more casual mind as unimaginative, obedient and as the victims of what one can only categorize as “group-think.”

This kind of approach dismisses mystery, exploration or any sense of intelligent progress. Would Columbia University be building a think-tank on the examination of the brain if we already had the answers we are looking for?

What if every star up there had a specific identification? Star Number 2981, say, has a world of activity on it and it has been catalogued and filed away in our archives; we don’t need to know anything more about it.

The future of our lives is already corroborated and so we only follow the orders provided in our fortune cookies or tea leaves. If the depths of our knowledge were already measured and evaluated like that, then why be born? We do indeed want to find new paths through the brush, the woods, and across the mountains’ inhospitable ranges and map out the unholy emptiness of deserts.

To be alive is an addiction we have simply because it is there and we hold onto the whole mystery of it all voluntarily unless it becomes for one reason or another involuntary as from pain or boredom. As Martin Luther King advised, we do not give up hope and, as this individual would add, even when there is nothing left to hope for. That kind of resignation can be real and without any escape, but that is the cost of just having, not the guarantee, but the possibility of finding out who we are every day.

Our reference point for meaning is ourselves. We often have the wherewithal to find a degree of salvation, or a creative calling, or a sense of duty fulfilled. Who can predict who we are? We need a voluntary commitment to find out. This stance does not absolve us of disappointment, error or even tragedy. But a life of rules, regulations, doctrines and order where trial and error are put aside for the sake of convenient thoughtlessness may absolve us of risk but the price of such safety, as in any totalitarian country or organization, is that our existence is lifeless. That may be easier to deal with, but without risk we are, indeed, lifeless and any meaning to it all is a meager one if, indeed, it isn’t completely absent to begin with.

As artists find they have a calling, whether or not it is a bed of roses, the rest of us find that being alive, all by itself, is a calling. We do want those rosy beds and since we need something, somewhere, that bed we lie in may only be a paper rose made out of twisted tissue paper. But we still keep calling, don’t we? And why not?