The Point Of Life

Some months ago now I was reading in the sun in my local park, as is my wont, when a youngish guy came up to the picnic table that I was sitting at alone and asked me what I was reading.  I told him - I think it was a novel about the great Roman statesman, Cicero* - and then he asked me if he could sit and ask me a few questions.  At which point I recognized him, and told him that he had asked me a similar question about four years previously, in another part of downtown Long Beach (where I have retired to, back in my old hometown, after having done my dash in life.  Presumably).  I explained where it had been, and I think he began to remember, although he has conducted so many of these street interviews.  That was his ‘job’ in life - he loved going around town and interviewing people briefly about their lives, and then posting his iv’s, and with photos, on his web site (which he proceeded to remind me of, by giving me his card).  I think his opening question was to ask me where I was now, in my thinking about things, since that day.  My response was rather blunt, as I recall; as I proceeded to say, right out of the barn:

“The point of life is not to make money.  The point of life is to achieve Self-realization.  As to our essential identity.  You see: We are all gods in the making.”

My feeling, as I think back to that moment, is that the iv began to go rapidly downhill from there; that he wasn’t interested in the ’the meaning to life’ subject so much as the color of the lives of everyday people in the town; and it was soon that he closed up his notepad and, getting up to leave, said “See you in four years”.  Friendily enough.  But I noted, in a day or so when I checked his web site, that he hadn’t added our little exchange in his online chronicle of life around town.

Well, that’s his business.  But I think he passed by a good opportunity.  

To be in on the ground floor of

Where We Are At in life on the old planet at this propitious time.

—

* ‘A Pillar Of Iron,’ by the pillar of iron herself, the great Taylor Caldwell.  I have since read a couple more of her prodigious output, ‘Captains And The Kings,’ and a remarkable novel about a queen in ancient Atlantis that she wrote when she was a pre-teen, even.  Later in her life she shared that she felt that that novel was about herself.  I don’t doubt it.  That was the sort of talent that she had: Extreme insight into the human condition.

   But to continue.