Playing to a Packed House

Kierkegaard advanced the idea that a person — not society, culture, or religion — is responsible for finding meaning in life and for living authentically, with passion and sincerity.

Life has its own hidden forces which you can only discover by living.
― Søren Kierkegaard 

Meaning begins and ends with consciousness. We sense and process while immersed in stimuli. We find our tribes and we make life-long connections.

We are here to notice each thing so each thing gets noticed. Together we notice not only each mountain shadow and each stone on the beach but, especially, we notice the beautiful faces and complex natures of each other. We are here to bring to consciousness the beauty and power that are around us and to praise the people who are here with us. We witness our generation and our times. We watch the weather. Otherwise, creation would be playing to an empty house.
― Annie Dillard

The summation of all consciousness is inestimable, if not infinite. If for nothing else but the will to live, the collective perceptions of all living organisms is a rapt audience. Nature, in the course of continuous unfolding, plays to a packed house.

Our home is the Earth. Our house is the universe.

According to the second law of thermodynamics, things fall apart. Structures disintegrate. Buckminster Fuller hinted at a reason we are here: By creating things, by thinking up new combinations, we counteract this flow of entropy. We make new structures, new wholeness, so the universe comes out even. A shepherd on a hilltop who looks at a mess of stars and thinks, ‘There’s a hunter, a plow, a fish,’ is making mental connections that have as much real force in the universe as the very fires in those stars themselves.
― Annie Dillard

Humans entertain the notion of counteracting the flow of entropy by creating things, by imposing temporary order, and by identifying and naming patterns in apparent replication and reoccurrence, but human purpose is disappointingly singular, like a mayfly hatch.

Consciousness is best not squandered. It ends in an instant.

REFERENCES

• Charles Bukowski, Arthur C. Clarke, Annie Dillard, John Cage, and Others on the Meaning of Life, by Maria Popova.
• Existentialism, Wikipedia.
• The Meaning of Life: Reflections in Words and Pictures on Why We Are Here, by David Friend, April 1991.