The billboard points to a truth that it most likely didn’t intend – even the most valiant attempts at self-creation depend upon others. Reality exists outside of me (it would even exist without me), and I simply participate in it. Reality is simply a given – it is given to me. My engagement with reality is filled with “givens” – namely, my wife, my children, my good health, my sufferings, etc. Not even my job is self-made. Any success in the workplace can be traced back through a network of “givens” – my schooling, the virtues passed on to me by my parents, support received from co-workers and employers. I think a purely self-made man would never escape his own mind, though I’m not sure what would be in that isolated mind. Failing to recognize the mistake in this “self-made” conception of life squashes any chance of astonishment. Self-made implies a self-imposing will, forcing life to conform to given standards. There is little room for surprise, only careful calculations.
Life is meaningful, not because I create my own perfect reality, but precisely because it is given. Life is gift. Life within reality has been given to us as a sort of intimate relationship – like that of child given to parent, and parent to child. Questions about what makes life meaningful, or where am I going, find their full flowering of meaning by plumbing the existential depths of my being.
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