Good to know?

I spend my life looking for answers. I wish I didn't. There aren't answers. Like true scientific thinking, where everything is only a theory. You can prove beyond 'reasonable' doubt, but that is different from proving beyond doubt. I want there to be certainty, but there never will be. It's why I envy people who really have faith, I guess. They know at bone level that something is true. Feel it, not have to know it.

I have felt like that about some things in my life. Do feel it, about some things. Though I have never felt it about the existence of God. In fact, I have certainty that there is no life after death, which kind of scuppers a lot of believing in an existence beyond the here-and-now, wordly, tangible. But I think it's part of that certainty that makes me determined to get the most out of every passing moment, because there is no way back and only a finite number of days to experience. But I also feel certain that there is always hope. I was once told that that's a bad thing, because it means that one will never be satisfied with the situation as it is. I seem, most of the time, to be able to live for the moment, because the moment is important, but to look beyond and out and up. I suppose I'm optimistic. It's quite a surprise to find that in someone who has bouts of clinical depression and anxiety, I think. But it makes it more obvious that depression is an illness and not the person I am at the base.

I know, bone deep, that the world is an amazing place, filled with amazing people. Sometimes, that gets forgotten, or obscured by other things. Perhaps the answers that I'm looking for are more to do with finding the great big Answer* to everything, and so I look to explore the world and to share it with people who are looking for the same. To connect. To touch and be touched. To be vulnerable, because that is how one can really feel, but to be allowed to see the vulnerability in other people, because mutuality is everything. To be part of it. What's the musical with that song in it? I'm sure there is one. That probably betrays quite how cheesy the sentiment is. But it also shows that so much of the world wants the same from their lives, no matter whether they choose to put that desire into cheesy music or films, carve it onto trees, write it down in a way that survives aeons, paint it on canvas in abstract shapes that are all but uninterpretable beyond the artist and a select circle. I suspect that many people don't express it at all; they just find echoes of the desire to be part of something bigger than themselves, to love and be loved, to know, in bad TV or slushy novels or the aforementioned musicals.

No answers, only potential consensus? A parliamentary majority? Who knows. There has to be an arbitrary cut off point at which one goes, 'this I am going to call knowing', or 'this I am going to just believe and hope'.


*Comments about 42 not the point here...