I have a philosophical bent. I like to contemplate truth, God, life, the universe, mankind, and myself, and the way these things are connected or related. I wouldn’t call myself a philosophical tour-de-force, by any means. Still, I enjoy thinking about such things. Doing so is one of my favorite parts of the experience of living my life.

This evening I stepped out onto my porch with some iced tea, sat down in the dusky light and started thinking. It wasn’t long, however, before I began formulating a more perfect glass of iced tea. And then I considered some family matters coming up this week. And I thought about my mood today; this light mixture of delight and vague unease which leaves me happy, but unsure if I should be so. And then I thought about how stupid is our family cat in his wreckless disregard for his own safety. And finally, I contemplated the fact that I wasn’t contemplating the things I had stepped out onto the porch to contemplate.

This is hard, I thought. What I meant is that it’s very easy to live life without contemplation of greater, philosophical and metaphysical matters. Not only is it difficult to push through the daily cares to contemplate the edges of the universe, but it’s frowned upon, at least in some circles. Sometimes I wonder to myself, am I so heavenly minded that I’m no earthly good? Or worse still, have I gone insane?

Obviously I don’t believe I’m really insane. And unless I become truly unhinged, I suppose no one will ever know the difference. For the crazy and the sane have this in common: they both proceed on the assumption that they are sane. That’s a philosophical conundrum we can’t escape; if we accept as a premise that our minds are utterly unreliable, then no further analysis or contemplation is efficacious. We might as well give up on philosphy and just live life attached to the mundane stream of events which come down to us through the job and the television and whatever are the most immediate demands upon us from our relationships. That oblique critique having been delivered, I still have to admit that striding through the worries and the problems and the distractions into the wide green pastures of meditation is difficult.

But it is worth it. Of that I am unshakeably convinced. Why? Because in some way that Wide Green World is where we actually live. Our daily grind only has meaning in as much as it is pinned up by our dreams, our desires, our principles and even an honest acknowledgement of our shortcomings. In short, it is our well contemplated ideals which shape our lives. It isn’t always obvious from the close-in view. But in the widest of views, out past the eulogies and biographies, anyone can see it is our ideals which not only shape our lives, but are, in and of themselves, the picture.

It’s just odd and difficult and generally annoying that we can’t do this all in a day. Our ideals are (or should be) too big for that. They ought to be so big that it takes an entire lifetime of toil to flesh them out. First we struggle to arrive at a conception of them. Then we labor every day to craft a picture of ourselves and of everything we love. This lifelong oeuvre is, ultimately, the truth about us. We can’t say the whole truth about ourselves in one day, anymore than Michaelangelo could carve the statue of David with a single blow of the hammer and chisel. We are a magnificent feat of engineering with a curious fact about our manufacture: it has to be done in little pieces.