I used to think the world was created by an all powerful, all knowing being, one with a plan and a purpose for what was created. Life’s goal was to determine where I fit into that grand design.
For many years of the in-between time in my life, I still held to the idea of the initial creation being just that, a creation. How could all this beauty and incredible co-ordination just have happened by chance?
Today, after many years of not being overly concerned with what was, mostly because my life was so full of all the things that are, that it necessitated full interaction with the present, I’m beginning to revisit what I think now.
It was always a stumbling block for me that when things were left on their own, they didn’t move together in some new thing, they broke down and degraded. Things didn’t compose, they decomposed. Leave a bag of watch parts for 50 years and you won’t have a watch, you’ll have a bag of rusted metal. Not order but entropy…the gradual decline, over time, into disorder.
Yet after a day of working in the garden, tonight I realized that this isn’t always so. Over time, a pile of leaves becomes a pile of soil, full of the microorganisms that help new things grow. There’s something new and very useful that comes of ‘leaving’ that (pun not really intended but unavoidable) and the same can be said of seeds. You leave them alone and flowers, trees and food come from those seeds. Nobody has to actively build babies; they also grow entirely on their own. So all those years, I could only see one side of it.
As I’ve let go of the indoctrination of my upbringing, I’ve taken care not to simply substitute one set of ‘answers’ for another; to not substitute an atheistic perspective for a religious one. That really only moves you down the same line, just to a different spot on it. I don’t know how we got here or what we’re supposed to do here, if anything. I’m OK to live in the question, in not knowing. In that state, new information is a lot easier to recognize and evaluate.
And it does come, the new information. Sometimes it dawns slowly, quietly, and other times it overwhelms with understanding.
Breaking free of the confines of the way of thinking I was raised in (as were my parents and their parents, for generations in the past) has been an often painful, lonely and grievous experience. And it’s also been freeing. As I’ve left the web that imprisoned me in ‘safety’ and ‘purpose’ I’ve actually found safety and purpose. Over the last years, even with tremendous turmoil and upset, having gone through events I’d never imagined I’d have to go through, I’m the happiest, the most content, the most curious and the most open and secure I’ve been in my life.
It’s true what a prophet stated many years ago… “you shall
know the truth, and the truth shall set you free”.
