Thoughts Over Coffee

To the world I know, it lasts but a passing instant and in that fleeting moment we are asked to find meaning. Love doth call us out from the shade of our hearts and for a moment our souls are lifted towards meaning. All the more painful to return to the cave with only sunburn to show for your troubles. I don’t feel life as Hobbes puts it is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” though I’m not convinced that he is that far off. This does not mean one should abandon hope in another day, as Tom Hanks taught us in Castaway, you never do know what will wash up on the beach the next day; though that means possible salvation goes hand and hand with potential ruin. Odysseus could have given up his journey everyday for twenty years but he didn’t, yet after the blood was cleaned from the Great Hall, he still had to awake the next morning to confront life’s daily chores. In striving to achieve meaning many of us hope to achieve some lasting prominence in this ephemeral world but I like to think back to the words of Lao Tzu

In the universe the difficult things are done as if they are easy.
In the universe great acts are made up of small deeds.
The sage does not attempt anything very big,
And thus achieves greatness

Yet that still leaves the question of what small deeds should be done. Aristotle wrote that “there are two things in which all which all well-being consists: one of them is the choice of a right end and aim of action, and the other the discovery of the actions which are means towards it; for the means and the end may agree or disagree”, which helps little in determining the proper end but does elucidate somewhat the choice that is our own….