Lives are judged by how long or short you live, moral or immoral, successful or unsuccessful in terms of fame, creativeness, acquisitions and relationships.
Meaningful lives are active in worthwhile projects, being excited and involved suggesting a commitment to some sort of objective value.
Examples of activities with meaning are moral and intellectual accomplishments, relationships with friends and relatives, aesthetic enterprises, religious practices, even mountain climbing and training for a marathon and caring for the less privileged.
Things that don't have meaning are lives given to corporations, religious cults, people who collect rubber bands, making handwritten copies of the Bible, watching sitcoms, memorizing the dictionary meeting a movie star and solving crossword puzzles. Here is an example; the pig farmer who buys more land to grow more corn to feed more pigs to buy more land to grow more corn to feed more pigs.
Why then, is caring for a sick friend meaningful, when providing financial support for a sick stranger is meaningless?
Why is solving a (hard) crossword puzzle not an intellectual accomplishment?
What is the difference meeting a movie star than a famous philosopher?
Collecting rubber bands I'll have to admit is a little strange but what is the difference when people devote their lives to collecting bottle tops, stamps, coins, or baseball cards? Are some collections meaningless over others?
I have one friend who is an avid bingo player, another who isn't. Is one right and the other wrong?
Mindless, futile, and never-ending tasks are meaningless, but is physical conditioning meaningless or trying to persuade others to think your way, or trying to eliminate diseases never ending and meaningless?
Weight training, lifting heavier and heavier weights may be mindless and never ending but is that a reason to belittle weightlifting?
We should appreciate a person who finds delight in something and brings no harm to anyone.
Written over two thousand years ago in the Book of Ecclesiastes: Even if a man lives many years, let him enjoy himself in all of them, remembering how many days of darkness there are going to be.
Makes sense doesn't it, eh?
No comments:
Post a Comment