Meaning Sought, Gained and Possibly Explained
Walking beach side yesterday Jackson and I talked about one of our favorite water themes – “Nemo.”
Not the Nemo associated with Jules Verne, but the one associated with dvds that play in endless loops on wide screen tvs in Chicago homes and around the world after nap-time or before bedtime.
It’s the fish, man.
And as we talked of Nemo and this place where he lives and how important it is to put trash in its proper place lest we impinge on his home and possibly harm him I drifted my hands through the water feeling the water sift between my finger and wedding band and thought how sad it would be if my ring were to somehow loosen and drop from my hand and plop in the froth and nestle into the sand below.
And then it would be gone, man.
And then I did what I often do, I transposed the letters of the word I was thinking of and suddenly Nemo became omen. Then my brain raced from point to point thinking if the water were to shrink my finger and if the water were to coerce the ring to fall and if the ring went missing would all of this add up to be an omen? And if so, what would the omen be.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, And so, too, is meaning.
If any of this were to happen (and none of it did), would there be some deeper meaning, something Jungian about it all. Or would it simply be an occurrence? An event among many events that stitch together the patchwork quilt of life.
Of course all of this purely subjective, based on personal experience and possibly even more so by faith of the hope of something better. As this second day of the new year watches the second hand spin I think of the facebook updates and twitter tweets I have witnessed the past few days that espouse momentary reflections on what to do and how to do it.
In other word, resolutions.
As I mused over my walk with Jackson, my twisting of semantics, new year’s resolutions and the sense of hope that the new year inspires I thought of Victor Frankl and his seminal book, “Man’s Search for Meaning.” A powerful quote from this autobiography of his surviving the darkest of pains and sufferering in a Nazi concentration camp embodies something that might serve as a profound daily mantra:
It did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us. We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by lifeĀ ā€“ daily and hourly. Our answer must consist, not in talk and meditation, but in right action and in right conduct. Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual.
And so with my ring still firmly affixed to my finger and the a repository of various thoughts that danced within my noggin during and after a beach side walk I find a truer and higher inspiration as the new year rests before me like a tablet to be written upon by my pen in my handwriting.
Yesterday was happy new year. Today being the second, happy two year.
And so it goes.
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Yow. If James Joyce had a blog it would be “The Real Estate Lounge Chicago”!