Life, the Universe, and Everything


You know, I always thought "the Ultimate Answer to the Ultimate Question, of Life, the Universe, and Everything," being equal to "42" was a bit of a copout on Douglas Adams' part. Like, don't you think a smart guy like him would be able to come up with something a little more profound? Oh, I knew it was a joke, but I just didn't really get it. I guess he was pretty well on the right track, if you're able to read between the lines. See, we start with an advanced civilization questioning the very root meaning of existence, looking for an answer that would satisfy the age-old enquiry, "Why are we here?" And they were smart enough to build a computer that could calculate that answer for them. For all the good it did, they might as well have spent those resources calculating pi = 3.14... to the gajillionth decimal place, when any idiot knows that that's nothing but a circle. Maybe life is a circle, maybe it's a spiral, maybe it's a whole bunch of things, but the point is this: when you're done explaining it to yourself, you can move past the question and just live it like you would have, had the question never occurred to you in the first place. I know that's unfair and not really what I mean, but seriously, maybe the Question actually is the Answer in a different form, like "What is it? It is what it is." So life is its own Question and its own Answer, and maybe the point is to just explore everything it has to offer and to one day maybe stop pretending we don't know what this is all about. Where we came from and where we're going... it's the same thing. And if that's so, then everything really is OK and there's nothing in this universe to be afraid of. All those things we think are really scary and bad, what are they but stuff we dreamed up to tell ourselves that it's not what it really was all along, the perfect expression of an eternally loving God?

0 comments: