To hell with it

Lately I've been trying to make sense of things, probably too hard.

I try to recall life experiences that seemed most saturated in meaning, and here is the first that comes to mind.

I was 23 and had flown to British Columbia for my first trip alone. Crossing Vancouver Island by rented car, I camped on the beach at Pacific Rim to spend the next few days combing the sand. One afternoon I explored some West Coast temperate rainforest, exotic and incredible to an Easterner. Its monstrosity had been carefully preserved. Everything, from the trees to ferns to slugs, was oversize. No one should ever venture off the trail. One might become hopelessly tangled a few steps from the path and die of exposure or starvation.

Before me lay the corpses of ancient fir trees, bigger than any organism I had ever seen. Their skeletons criss-crossed the landscape, rotting slowly over the course of decades, and from their rot had risen a new generation of giants to maturity.

In the midst of this cycle, a mish-mash of death and life, a personal revelation blinded me. I saw my own misery reflected (how easily we project our own feelings onto things that can't explain themselves!). I had been reading the Bible a whole lot, and saw proof of some particular verses from the Book of Romans.

For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of Him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself also will be set free from its slavery to corruption into the freedom of the glory of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation groans and suffers the pains of childbirth together until now.

It brought home to me, as never before, what weight of a curse humanity had blighted upon the earth. I wasn't thinking of simple irresponsibility or abuse of the environment, but the eternal scorch of innate sinfulness, our indelible error of rebellion against God. For long moments I stood in wonder, basking in the distilled syrup of shame, collapsing under the collective decay of forest and philosophy. It was an exquisite experience, both resounding and depressing. It felt so meaningful because I desperately needed meaning, to pigeon myself into a hole in the universe, a volume on the relentless shelves of human thought.

From faraway now I recognize those thoughts as a load of shit, and my need for meaning as part of the general insecurity and neediness I was heir to.

No meaning is necessary. How much better to divest ourselves of the pointlessness of finding the point. This life is a brief shimmering of neurons, a fireworks display over the course of a few scant decades. Our emotions, thoughts and sensations are so vivid, we're better to simply roll with them than waste time sorting them out. I don't mean to advocate abdication of responsibility for the consequences of our actions, but simply to stop taking it all so damn seriously.

What comes to mind now is one of my heroes, the animated character Ms. Frizzle from the TV series The Magic Schoolbus, which ran in the mid-90s when my daughters were little (and I only tonight learnt she was voiced by the incomparable Lily Tomlin!). Her purpose was experimentation and discovery. Her motto was, "Take chances, make mistakes, and get messy!"

Christian theology (as so many of my choices in this life) invested too much in getting things right. I'm beginning to believe we can't grasp meaning until we let go of it.

And so I say, to hell with knowing anything.