There’s a few things that I had planned to write about today, yet they got shuffled when I was re-reading Murakami’s, “Kafka On The Shore“. I had read the book many years ago.

As most good books, it’s worth revisiting after some years because you find different things. This morning, sipping coffee, I found one of those things that applied to much of what I have been thinking about since yesterday.

“”…To get from here to there.” She holds up her right index finger and her left index finger, about twelve inches apart.

“What does it matter what it’s called? she continues. “You’ve got your restrooms and your food. Your fluorescent lights and your plastic chairs. Crappy coffee. Strawberry-jam sandwiches. It’s all pointless – assuming you try to find a point to it. We’re coming from somewhere, heading somewhere else. That’s all you need to know, right?”

I nod. And nod. And nod.

Haruki Murakami, Kafka On The Shore (2005), p23.

Aside from the strawberry-jam sandwiches, I know where she speaks of, and more importantly, I know better what she speaks of 18 years after I first read the book. The transition across space and time is made mundane by the mundane, but the mundane is what makes the exceptional.

There can be nothing exceptional without the mundane. The exceptional is… an exception.

That in turn ties to this post in the Marginalian, “Consciousness, Artificial Intelligence, and Our Search for Meaning: Oliver Sacks on ChatGPT, 30 Years Before ChatGPT“, which in turn points to some of Norman Weiner’s work.

“Our search for meaning, Sacks intimates, will be forever part of the human organism’s experience of optimal functioning — an experience, to me, qualitatively different from anything an artificial intelligence can approximate, to the extent that it can even have experience at all.”

Maria Popova, Consciousness, Artificial Intelligence, and Our Search for Meaning: Oliver Sacks on ChatGPT, 30 Years Before ChatGPT

And so we get to meaning, but anything without meaning is… pointless. Yet often what we think is pointless actually does have a point we might find later on (by re-reading books years later). Why is that?

Because meaning is a derivation of whatever our focus is, and so in one moment, one’s focus may be on something but years later, the focus necessarily shifts – or you’re stuck in a loop that you should probably talk to someone about.

As we grow, our focuses change. Some things become more important than they used to be, others less important. Where I once used to be notorious for partying all night, I am lesser known now for passionately reading late into the night with a book that I’m comfortable waking up with.

My paternal grandfather’s old adage, “Never lie down with someone you cannot stand up with” springs to mind, and it applies not just to the patently obvious but anything we commit to doing.

Meaning is information seen through a perception of a particular focus, or group of focuses, and information alone cannot fill that void.

Information alone is a one night stand that leaves us without meaning, and maybe even with some version of a hangover or disease.

Meaning varies for each of us, yet collectively at times we find meaning that groups will work towards. And at other times, it means reading a comfortable book through older eyes.