Responding to a recent post, Chris Crawford provided a wonderful picture of how our lives could be significant regardless of our deaths. He writes,
… the that means of 1’s life resides within the story that one creates by residing. Once we die, those that knew us inform others the story we solid by dealing with the vicissitudes of life. That story is condensed right down to its essence and turns into a part of the tradition.
Consider our tradition as an enormous crowd of the ghosts of our ancestors and their lives. Then de-anthropormorphize that crowd, leaving simply the tales behind. Our contribution to that crowd is the that means of our life. It’s everlasting; faint echoes of the lives of our most distant ancestors ripple by way of our tradition right now. That’s the ever-lasting contribution we make to humanity. It’s measured not by private success, however by the instance we set.
We are able to quibble with a couple of particulars right here. Maybe others gained’t inform our story or, even when they do, will probably be forgotten. Possibly humanity and the universe gained’t survive, so any constructive contribution is fleeting.
Nonetheless, I feel there’s something profound about this picture. The current—our science, artwork, philosophy, authorities, and so on.—is basically the results of what individuals have executed previously. The nice and dangerous deeds and concepts of our previous reverberate into the current; to say nothing of the reconstitution of the genes themselves from one era to the subsequent. Mr. Crawford is true, “faint echoes of the lives of our most distant ancestors ripple by way of our tradition right now.”
Is the that means of life to create a constructive echo? Put otherwise, don’t we discover that means by being part of the bigger complete of humanity? I feel that’s as shut as we would get to there being a that means to our lives. Right here I feel Mr. Crawford’s concepts echo these of Will Durant who wrote,
… don’t despond; the despised “yokel” enjoying ball along with his fellows within the lot is happier than these remoted thinkers, who stand other than the sport of life and degenerate by way of the separation … If we consider ourselves as a part of a residing … group, we will discover life a little bit fuller … For to offer life a that means one should have a function bigger and extra enduring than one’s self.
If … a factor has significance solely by way of its relation as half to a bigger complete, then, although we can’t give a metaphysical and common that means to all life on the whole, we are able to say of any life within the explicit that its that means lies in its relation to one thing bigger than itself …
However can we go additional and say that our tales and our love conquer dying? Right here now we have no solutions, we solely have hope.
The hope that traces of our love will reverberate by way of time, in ripples and waves that can at some point attain peaceable shores now unbeknownst to us.
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