meaning

Murakami On The Elevator

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As I got home, walking to the elevator, I was still pondering the fun, “Which came first, the purse or the lack of pockets?” question in my mind. I don’t really want to know the answer, it’s just fun to consider.

Not everything needs answers.

I’d given up coming up with theories on the ffft-ffft lady.

Not everything has answers.

On the way there, my trains of thought – I never have just one train going – were interrupted by some friendly faces. A newly married couple, I know he sells insurance and is generally a nice guy, while his new wife is still a bit of a mystery to me. She’s nice, polite, and likes coffee, which makes her a better human being than him in my eyes.

He doesn’t drink coffee. That seems sinful after all the wars and empires involved in bringing coffee from Ethiopia to the rest of the world, but what I consider sinful is subjective.

We have polite conversation, and going up in the elevator, he spots my book. I had returned home early because I was thinking of meaning and wanted to get that writing done and didn’t want to get lost in another group of trains of thought, so I had my receipt from the coffee shop sticking out from the pages.

“What are you reading?”, he asks.

“Oh, some Murakami. I haven’t read this book in some years and decided to revisit it.”, I respond.

His eyes blank, he has nowhere to go with that. It’s not something that is standard fare in Trinidad and Tobago, I suppose, so I try to be helpful.

“It’s where that quote about the storm comes from. How when you come out of the storm you’re never the same as when you went in.”

This, according to his facial expression, did not help either, but the idea began to toss around in his head.

“OK”, he says, as I exit the elevator. He never struck me as a reader, but then most of the literati in Trinidad and Tobago have an insane focus on the Caribbean and Caribbean authors, enough so that in some ways Trinidad and Tobago is a tidal pool, where ideas wash in mainly from distilled island authors.

At least that’s my experience, what I have observed, and it’s purely anecdotal. To me, though, if you have not read Haruki Murakami, you’re missing a bit of life.

Suddenly, as I unlocked my door, I laughed to myself.

I had just done an elevator pitch of, “Kafka on the Shore” without even knowing it.

I hate elevator pitches.

The Derivation of Meaning.

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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.

A Canvas Of Time.

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Yesterday, when I wrote about meaning, and I want to propose one to consider.

We are all given a canvas of time. It helps to picture a canvas, or a blank page. We’re even given some crayons when we start off, and we decorate our time with them.

Later, we move onto more complicated stuff. Pens and markers, where we begin to realize that mistakes cannot be undone.

We move on to charcoal, maybe, and learn how messy life is and that when we are not decorating our decoration smudges the rest of our life- which isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

Later, we get paint, moving from watercolor to oil paints. I don’t know, I failed art in secondary school because I never did my art on time and you can’t time travel wet paint to dry.

The point is that this is probably our meaning. How we use our time is influenced by our biases, the biases other try to introduce, and those biases in turn influence what we think is ‘success’.

So here’s a story that is true, and how I came up with this. It started, like most things, from bullshit. From trying to help someone understand someone important to them that I happened to understand.

Some years ago, before his father died, a young cousin of mine was telling me how terrible a businessman his father was. My cousin had been studying business and at the time it seemed like he was good at it.

I was sipping coffee, head down, and I listened to his tirade of all the things his father had done wrong. As far as business, to be honest, that Uncle, like his brothers, wasn’t very good, and after talking to a good business man about my grandfather, I understood why.

“…and that’s why the business is not a success, and I don’t think he will ever be a success either.”, was the end of his tirade. I remember I chuckled and met his eyes, suddenly feeling a lot older than I had moments before, a new weight settling on my shoulders.

I told him that his father had managed to provide for 4 children, sending 2 of them to college in the United States, and his last – him – through a local satellite college. He had bought all the boys cars – the daughter married – and one brother was setup with his own house, another was sent abroad to Canada and partially supported for a while, and he was living in a house that was once home to all of them and then 2 families at peak.

He had seen all but one of his children married, and the bachelor was sitting across from me and would soon be married. He had followed his passion of religious knowledge and even tried practicing it a bit. He had been married himself for at least 40 years, I don’t know, and had taken care of himself and his wife.

There are times when we sons think our fathers are idiots. It works both ways. But my Uncle, despite how much his son disagreed with his business practices and other things, was certainly not a failure. He put his family first, and every bad decision was generally a decision where he put his family before his business.

My Uncle, despite my own misgivings, was someone who had found his own success, based on his values. My cousin grumbled, and maybe it stuck, maybe it didn’t, but it stuck with me.

On the canvas of life, the theme was family and connection. If you were looking for corporate art, he wasn’t your guy. I’d say that was a success.

The question is figuring out what is success for you. There’s your meaning.

I’m trying to figure mine out still, so please ignore the mess, and be careful what you touch and where you step. Wet paint everywhere.

Meaning.

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We’re told that life is supposed to have some meaning. Some goal, some purpose. The truth is that we don’t know. Because we don’t know, most people are scared and try finding some meaning in life, and that can be a lot like trying to interview an octopus.

Maybe life’s purpose is to find meaning. Maybe there is no actual meaning. After all, if our lives have meaning, that would mean that everything else has meaning, and all of that meaning would have a deeper meaning.

But what does that all mean? What do we gain from having meaning other than comfort? Why can’t we simply be?

There doesn’t need to be a point to life. Realizing there isn’t an inherent point that you need to figure out can be freeing. Appreciating that life has no inherent point frees you to create your own point, your own meaning. Recognizing that you can create your meaning, that you can simply enjoy your one and only life, with all of its ups and downs, maybe the most freeing experience of all. As the co-creator of Rick and Morty said, “everything is the meaning of life.”

‘There Is No Point: Believing there is no point in life can be depressing or freeing.‘, William Berry, LMHC., CAP., Psychology Today, October 19, 2017

I’ve been ‘being’ for a while, and it’s been a pretty full time job. I don’t really need a layer of meaning on top of it that someone else provides. I’d rather interview an octopus.

I think interviewing an octopus would be fun. They might not think so, though.

The point is that there doesn’t have to be a point. When I say that, it concerns some people who expect people to be satisfied with the mundane as having meaning. In the end, we die, we’re either combusted or buried or fed to fish – and interestingly in the Himalayas, there’s a sky burial which is not what you think. Life can be meaningless, a variable to which we assign a value.

The trouble sometimes is assigning a value to that variable. That value can change, and it often does when we’re not paying attention. Sometimes it just sits there with a null value for a while, and that’s ok too. Eventually there will be some purpose or meaning, even if it is to find that purpose or meaning.

It’s Not About Success.

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_Gustave Le Bon Error

I was reading GS’s “Not Successful Enough?”, and I wanted to take this in a different direction because I don’t think it’s about success.

Success means different things to different people, but most of the time when people refer to being successful they mean financial success, or career ‘success’, whatever that might be.

What do you consider successful beyond those red dots? We’re told that’s success, we’re indoctrinated to believe it’s success because we send off the little kids to go to school so that they can get jobs so that they can be… successful.

In some part, our parents and family determine what we believe what success is, but it’s institutionalized in our schools and even in advertising what success is.

They also say you need to have children, which makes sense in a way since that’s how you pass on all that genetic soup made up of male and female zygotes so that they too can be… successful. Most of the zygotes, by the way – the vast majority – are not considered successful, not because they don’t have jobs and fancy titles, but because their job is really to be numerous in the hope one of them is successful. That’s really the larger game being played with jobs and titles by homo sapiens.

I used to think that money mattered, and it does to some degree but not as much as people who want you to buy their crap want you to think. I never really thought titles mattered because I have so many people who are in some sort of authority that are idiots and consistently screw things up that I’m not impressed by titles, or diplomas, or academic degrees.

If there is any success for a human in this world, it’s based on a value. Different cultures have different values, different families instill (or not) different values, and different people have different values. The question about success is really a question of, say it out loud, values.

If you don’t feel your successful enough, take some time and consider what you believe your values to be. Look back on the things you felt successful about, or what you believe you failed at. You can’t miss the feeling of success or failure, they stand out. Maybe write a list. Maybe do a spreadsheet. Just do it. Examine each success and each failure. Examine the values associated with them. Examine the circumstances around them.

And work on the values, maybe. Maybe what you presently believe is success is not really what you feel is successful. Maybe you’re just making yourself unhappy for no good reason, stressing out over the need to buy meaningless crap to impress meaningless people with the net result of having a meaningless life.

There are two people who drive nice BMWs in my neighborhood, and I’m friends with them despite having a Hyundai. They constantly complain about parts, service, etc. They’re successful, right? Are they? They’re unhappy with their cars, so that doesn’t seem much like success to me, but people see them in these cars and believe they are successful because… why?

I believe that while we’re all in this artificial rat race of life that gives some advantages over others – and regardless of how it is done, some people will always have some advantages – if you can find meaning and value in what you do, you are more of a success than advertising campaigns would have you believe. You may well be a success in many ways and are simply wanting to appear successful.

The people who matter in life see your value beyond what they can use you for and what they can get from you. If you’re being told you’re not a success, question the intentions of the people making you believe it.

Meanwhile, be nice to the people who deserve it and even some that don’t.

The Negotiation

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MeaningAs a child, my mother would tell me to clean my room, something I often felt was a punishment or a way to get me out of her hair which was at least partly right given what I have learned as an adult. And so I would go and do things, largely unproductive, and then say I had cleaned my room.

She never thought I had. And after a while she seemed to realize she and I had very different ideas of what a clean room was and told me that before I told her that the room was clean I should stand at the doorway, pretend I was her, and see if the room was clean. This was a great idea, but poorly implemented in retrospect, as she never quite told me what she was looking for in a clean room. Suffice to say my room was never clean in her eyes, and in mine it was almost always clean.

Everyone has some sort of story like that, where in communicating we might say the same words with very different meanings, and this negotiation is something we end up doing every day.

Yesterday, someone wrote that gravity was ‘the way that objects were attracted to each other’, which doesn’t stand as much rigor as he was trying to demonstrate. There are other reasons that objects are attracted to each other, such as ionic and covalent bonding, and gravity by itself isn’t an answer as much as a question. Sure, scientists have learned a lot about gravity, but the notion of gravity itself as we accept it and how scientists deal with it is different. Gravity is an explanation, and more accurately, it’s an evolving explanation, as everything is.

Meaning changes. Meaning is constantly being negotiated between people, between peoples, and even within ourselves. At some point, we as individuals decide when we’ll just call something by a name, and collectively, society does the same based on how popularly lazy we are about it – after all, if we got muddled down in being pedantic about everything, nothing would get done – but underneath it all, we have to understand, everything is being negotiated.

Everything.

And everything we agree upon will eventually change.

Everything.

Solitude: Meaning

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existence_solitudeI’ve been fiddling around with Inspirobot.me because, randomly, it comes up with images like the one on the right.

When you rip away the narratives, the fictions and get to the core of it you’ll find that solitude. Some call it a meditation. That the image involved someone writing seemed somewhat appropriate as well – that’s my mode, laying pen to paper. And solitude is not a bad thing; most people confuse it with loneliness. The two are mutually exclusive.

Loneliness is a yearning to not be alone; solitude is a state of being where I can control what comes in and can pay appropriate respect to the information I have observed. I started doing it long ago as a way to get to sleep – going over the day’s events in my mind, replaying words spoken, watching facial expressions, re-experiencing moments from the safe solitude of my mind.

In a world that craves being shared, being connected to, solitude is rare – but worth every moment for critical thought, for seeing things apart from the narratives of others and the fictions of society and even ourselves.