More Meaning Of Life Stuff, With 70% More Doctor Who!
Yeah, yeah, more “meaning of life stuff” — but this time with Doctor Who!
I was watching last year’s Christmas Special again, sort of fast-forward like, for the good bits, and caught this great exchange I seem to have missed the first time. It perfectly describes my sense of the meaning of life. The Doctor has taken Donna, the Bride, to the beginning of the Earth, when the rocks all coalesce into what is to be our planet. As they watch the process begin…
DONNA: Where’s the Earth?
THE DOCTOR: All around us, in the dust.
DONNA: Puts the wedding in perspective. Lance was right, we’re just… tiny.
THE DOCTOR: No, but that’s what you do - the human race! Make sense out of chaos! Marking it out, with weddings, and Christmas and calendars!
Looking out at the unformed Earth: This whole process is beautiful - but only if it’s being observed.
Indeed. The purpose of life — or its blessing, if you don’t like the idea of “purpose” — is to enjoy the amazingness of existence. There’s so much wonder in the world, but only if it’s being wondered at.
When we spend all our time focusing on the bad bits, the minor annoyances, even on the people around us who are so different — immature, improper, not in line with our ideas, whatever — when we cultivate these negative mental habits and, in essence, spend all our time worshiping at the idol of self-righteousness… we lose ourselves and abrogate our own meaning, our own reason for existence.
And when we feel ourselves above everything, wanting nothing to do with the silly things other people do that just seem to mark out the time… best to consider that marking out the time is what makes order out of the chaos, what makes us feel human.
It’s only too bad that so many of our calendar events and celebrations have lost a lot of these connections. There’s something to be said for the age-old celebrations of equinoxes, solstices, Beltane, Samhain, etc. What better way to pay proper homage to the wonders of existence than by marking the celestial rhythms of the Earth?
Posted: May 8th, 2007 under Damek, Philosophy, Science, Spirituality.
Comment from Leshka
Time Wednesday, May 9, 2007 at 10:06 pm
“When we spend all our time focusing on the bad bits…we lose ourselves and abrogate our own meaning, our own reason for existence.”
When people don’t realize that there are other people in the world around them, they play music loudly, they bump into people, they stand in front of subway doors when others want to get in, they speak on their cell phones too loudly, etc. In a word, they’re rude. When science has proven that many people listen to their music too loudly, you know that there’s something wrong. Maybe I’m too sensitive and too nice, but I don’t like it when people get in my face for doing something rude because I don’t look like I’m going to kill them if they say something. I wish I could ask someone to please move out of the way and that person would do it, but when I ask, I usually get mocked and said person purposely moves in my way.
So what’s a girl to do? If I’m a bitch, I get in trouble. If I’m nice, I suffer. And that lowers my quality of life. There’s a lot of things I’ll handle - it’s the cost of living in a big city, but unnecessarily imposing on others is no good in my book. The only thing I can do, if I can’t move away from the situation, is comment on it.