2. THE RELEVANCE OF DISCOVERY
Discovery [dih-skuhv-uh-ree]
Noun
The act or an instance of discovering.
Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better known as Mark Twain is known to have said, "The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why." Yet most of us would tide through our lives not allowing ourselves to give too much thought to why we were born at all. This is an interesting fact in the light of Mark Twain's statement. Because an evaluation of the same would mean that many of us have never realized the 2nd most important day of our lives.
The problem with the search for relevance in our lives is that we do not want to have to engage in this search; yet our innate beings push us, even beg us to answer this question. It is a paradox of sorts because we can't seem to bear to live with the mystery; yet find it almost impossible to find an answer that is truly satisfying. It makes us miserable especially when nothing seems to be making sense, it makes us frustrated when we can't seem to get a handle on situations and bend them to our wishes; but mostly it makes us feel helpless when we can seem to do nothing but resign to our mundane daily lives with no particular logical end in sight. The search for relevance is the quintessence of our lives, yet it is the single most frustrating characteristic of being human.
I believe that the answer to our search for relevance lies in the act of discovering the relevance of our lives daily, one step at a time. By extension of the same, we have the premise that in the absence of the process of discovery for our relevance daily, we stand little or no chance of ever finding the answer that our very existence begs of us. How could that even be true?
Think about it this way:- If you find yourself in a market wondering why you are waiting in queue to buy some meat, chances are that you are there because:
a. you wanted to eat the meat and drove yourself there to buy it
b. you are running an errand for somebody near home who told you to buy the meat for them
c. you are accompanying somebody to the market and they kept you in queue to get the meat, while they finished shopping for other stuff
or d. you are either sleep walking / raving mad and are in the queue in the market to just stand there for no apparent reason
If your answers are a or b or c, you arrived at those conclusions by ticking off the obvious fact in play and trying to discover the most relevant truth to you at that time. If you were to however skip the entire discovery process and not tick off the obvious and most relevant truth pertaining to situation, you are faced the response d and immediately begin to wonder if there is no better explanation; because regardless of your persuasion about philosophical thought and method, our brains seem hard-wired to seek eudaimonian balance in the reason for what we are doing. In essence our brains are hard-wired to walk through a serious of analytical questions to answer reasonably why we find ourselves in that market queue; in other words we discover our reason for being there.
Our lives are very much like that market queue we find ourselves in. We do not know why we are there but we certainly need to know. As we analyze all possible answers to the same, we start by eliminating the obvious and work our way to an answer one step at a time; in other words, we discover our true purpose. The important thing to remember though is that this discovery is a process that cannot be bypassed. The same way that Einstein didn't know when he was 15 that he would hailed the greatest mind of the 20th century, nor did Mother Teresa know that she would be hailed as the icon of humanitarian outreach when she was 10. We need to go through our lives, discovering each day who we are; else we only land up bitter and disillusioned.
In this context, frustrating though it is many a time to deal with the same; it is easy to understand the relevance of discovery in our lives. But there is another reason that discovery is important to us - it is the crux of what makes our lives relevant and makes us who we are. From the time we are born we are always discovering something about ourselves - our likes / dislikes, our palette, our facial impressions, clothes that bring us looking close to our own self-image, our values and what we truly believe in, etc. This process of discovery is what leads us to finding our perceived true selves. Discovery is the cornerstone of the Philosophy of Self; without it, we would never be able to define ourselves.
Now lets consider an alternate viewpoint - literally. In order to find relevance, we know we must discover our selves, our lives and our purpose; frustrating as it is. But it would be of great advantage if we could analyze our lives from a lens other than our own. An external lens that has not limitations of its own, nor possessing biases that would render its viewpoint just as skewed as ours, would give us great insight into our lives and its purpose. Such an objective picture though can be gained only from a viewpoint that is far removed from our own lives, yet intimately able to perceive and capture even the finest details. Very much like an aerial camera can provide a whole new perspective to a soccer game, all it takes is a glance from a viewpoint high up and removed to completely change our perspective on the way we perceive things. The question though is, does there exist such an objective viewpoint; so far removed that it is unaffected and unbiased, yet so intimately connected so as provide us insights into our lives?
For me that is the ultimate viewpoint. There is not a time when i have stood on a seashore looking at the vast ocean or looked at the fluffy clouds from the window seat aboard a flight that i have not wondered just how constrained i am. More importantly, i wondered whether i would ever be able to understand things from such an objective viewpoint; given how constrained i am.
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