remembering where I came from

This is something I posted 2 and a half years ago on an internet philosophy discussion board. The topic of the thread was "Are we that meaningless?"

At several points in the span of the past half hour I have found myself agreeing with most of the opinions in this thread. I of course bring one more to the discussion.

Why are we searching for the meaning of life anyway? Searching for a single meaning that applies to us all is sort of like looking at the big picture because the smaller frame that is our life cannot have importance independent of the whole. And it's funny because if you can't find yourself to be important (or meaningful) as an individual, you're actually letting down a part of the big picture.

What if the big picture is just a disorganized mess of little ones, a mosaic that doesn't reveal any particular design? We don't know...can we know?...who knows...

I'm still young and it seems like life is going to be short. I'm afraid of death, but I'm excited for what happens next. Maybe it's better that it just happens to me because how the hell am I supposed to know what to do next, or what to do now?!?!

Even though I've said this, I still want to know what's in store. I want to know why I am here. I want it to make sense, as if it were a reason I could understand and think "ohhhh.....so that's why....wow, cool!"

I wish I could contribute a little more, I had a few interesting thoughts, but they evaporated almost as quickly as they began to form... I'll still be here though, still thinking.

It was the summer before my freshman year in college. I had already decided that I would study philsophy in college a year and a half prior to this, at some point during my junior year in high school. I have to say, it's kind of weird, morbid, nostalgic, even interesting to be able to look back at something I wrote, something I thought, something I thought about very hard before posting (as usual - whether I appear to you better or worse for it), something I believed, something I confessed, something I was - two and a half years ago. That something is still a part of me, I feel. Many different thoughts have occupied my mind since then, but to read again what I once wrote, I can say that the words I posted then are not at all foreign to me now. I am actually surprised that what I said then is soo close to who I still am. It's almost uncanny, and slightly disorienting. In a good way. I have such a difficult time figuring out who I am and dealing with my identity, my self-concept, the I, that I think to see such consistency in my thoughts after over two years of life is a remarkable insight into my own identity.

I probably seem pretty funny to you with all this talk of not knowing who I am. Just saying this I am reminded of the oft-quoted Socrates and his famous imperative: "[Above all] Know thyself." Maybe there is something to this. To know thyself seems to be the fundamental objective in anyone's life. And I don't know how you could arrive at such knowledge other than through self-reflection. I mean, sure you could live life to the fullest (however that may be), but if you never think about the things you have said or the things you have done or the things you have thought, do you know who you are? You can be, but do you know what that being is?

I'm afraid that I am rapidly coming to the end of this post. I'm hitting a block in my thinking, just as I did two and a half years ago when it seemed that my incoming thoughts had evaporated "almost as quickly as they began to form." This pattern of hitting a wall in new thought, where I'm left to ponder the old worn out thoughts that continue to circulate and take up all the space in my head, has got to be of some importance. There has to be something to say about why this happens, whether it is a pattern many people experience, and whether it is a pattern I can change.

Why do I feel so much less articulate than my 17 year old self? Another good question. On the one hand, I would like to say that I have changed. That if you were to transport my 17 year old self here to meet me, he and I would find that we are two different people. On the other had, I also feel that who I once was, what I once thought, never really is gone. That, somehow, my 17 year old self is still inside me, maybe a few layers down. Because the differences between my present self and my 17 year old self are so insignificantly minute that even if I have not seen people for two and a half years, they still, without strain, recognize me as ... me. And not as a different person, unrecognizable. I guess that brings up the question: am I still me?

It's a fact that I've known people who wish they were the same as they were before - who wish they had never changed from who they used to be - and it may be morbid to think about, but if one's past self is a few layers underneath the present self does that then mean that people sometimes wish newer layers had never smothered older ones? Can I ever revert back to who I used to be? I feel like it's impossible to whack off the topmost layers to get to the ones underneath, that it's only possible to add another layer to who I am. There are some who would say that when we change who are, we change so that there is nothing left of what used to be. That the layered theory is all wrong because there are no layers. In another camp, there are those who would say it is impossible to change at all. That who you are is who you are, always, no matter how you try to hide or distort it.

At this point, I'm stupefied. What I thought would be a short post has dragged on to this. And, reading what I've written, it seems tinged with negativity. Does it seem to have a negative slant to you, or is that just me slanting it? An important question.

Goodnight. But oh what's the use of saying goodnight when there's no promise that you will read this at night? If you were here, now, I would say goodnight to you. But you aren't. So do I cut it out altogether or make it more general, like: "Cheers."