Stored personal memories along with handed down collective memories of stories, legends, and history allows us to collate our interactions with a physical and social world and develop a personal code of survival. In essence, we all become self-styled sages, creating our own book of wisdom based upon our studied observations and practical knowledge gleaned from living and learning. What we quickly discover is that no textbook exist how to conduct our life, because the world has yet to produce a perfect person – an ideal observer – whom is capable of handing down a concrete exemplar of epistemic virtues. We each draw upon the guiding knowledge, theories, and advice available for us in order to explore the paradoxes, ironies, inconsistencies, and the absurdities encountered while living in a supernatural world. We mold our personal collection of information into a practical practicum how to live and die. Each day we define and redefine who we are, determine how we will react today, and chart our quest into an uncertain future.
However, one day, this shallow living will not be enough for you. You are gifted with a questioning mind that will marvel at the deepest parts of the world around you. It will crave divine understanding because you are part of the divine whole, and it is the nature of the soul to seek to return to its spiritual state.
Human beings, in a sense, may be thought of as multidimensional creatures composed of such poetic considerations as the individual need for self-realization, subdued passions for overwhelming beauty, and a hunger for meaning beyond the flavors that enter and exit the physical body.
And if that's the case -- if we are our remembering selves -- then it matters far less how we feel moment to moment with our children. They play rich and crucial roles in our life stories, generating both outsize highs and outsize lows. Without such complexity, we don't feel like we've amounted to much. "You don't have a good story until something deviates from the expected," says McAdams. "And raising children leads to some pretty unexpected happenings.
Every form of life must struggle. Life is an aberration; death is ordinary. Life requires obstruction, conflict, reverses, and resolve. Life requires questing. Questing provides the meaning that we seek, a purpose to justify the inevitable struggle to live knowing the absurdity that we must die.
Pardon me, but my father says that it is a lie that Americans have everything. You have no sheep, no goats, no trees, no oil, no vines, no wine, not even chickens. He asks, 'What kind of life is that?' He says, 'No wonder you don't sing or dance or recite poetry very often.
A principled life begins by accepting the evident truth that we must die. Death becomes us. Knowledge of the impermanence of our existence reassures us that how we live does make a difference. Because our allotted time for living is finite, we must make the most of each day.