The meaning of life

Pray be seated, children.

Again, welcome to my corner. It has been a little while. I see that you have all grown, in the small ways people grow when they are not watching. I think it is time we sat with the largest of the old questions.

The meaning of life.

I used to think, in the days of my youth and prosperity, that the answer was love. Heraclitus said that everything flows. He was not speaking of rivers only. Love moves. It is not a stone you can put in a pocket and call a purpose. It arrives, it feeds, it changes its face, it goes. For some, love is a red, red rose. For me it is a crimson pool, and gone in a whisper. If love is the meaning, then I may as well wait for some later world, and hope the rules are different there.

So if not love, then what.

We reach for a name. I could say: I am a man. How much would that tell you. It is a word a society agreed to point in my general direction. It is not a description of a life. I could say: I am the sage. That is only another hat. It is scarcely more honest than the first.

I wonder whether there is any way I could tell you who I am by words alone. I could speak of dreams, of plans, of the day's small labour. You would still not know me. Language is a remarkable tool and a short one. I could go on, and on, and on, and you would have a story about a man who talks. You would not have the man.

This is not a failure of vocabulary. It is the shape of the thing. A word stands in for what is absent. "I" is a convenience, like "north", or "tomorrow". Useful. Not the territory.

If I cannot hand you myself in a sentence, I cannot hand you the meaning of a life in one either. Meaning is not a trophy on the far side of a correctly chosen noun. It is closer to the asking that Socrates would not give up: not because he enjoyed being difficult, but because a finished answer is a way of going to sleep.

What, then, is left.

Not nothing. The hen on the third row, faced with a pattern she cannot finish, stops eating. That is one response to mystery. Another is to keep walking, and to keep asking, knowing the last word will not arrive. Heraclitus' river is not an argument against living in it. It is an argument against pretending you have stepped out onto the bank with the water in a jar.

I do not know the meaning of life. I am suspicious of anyone who does. I know a few things that are not it: a title, a slogan, a love that promises to stay still. I know that we are, for a while, the animal that can notice the pattern breaking. That noticing is not a meaning. It is the condition under which a meaning could matter.

Sit with that, if you will. I have to go.

The sage.