Setting my direction

January 17, 2020

This morning I got an email from Past Me. Good old Past Me! What a guy!

He sent me love and hopes for my future.

He told me that he hoped that I would spend my day being grateful for what I’d gotten from him and other Past Me’s. And indeed, I am.

Thank you, Past Me.

Thanks all of you, Past Me’s.

He told me that he hoped that I would spend this day creating a better Future Me.

That’s something that he or some other Past Me had wanted to do, and he wanted to remind me of that decision, so I could decide if I agreed. Absent the reminder, I might have forgotten.

I probably would have forgotten.

But thanks to Past Me, I was reminded.

Finding the direction

Past Me’s note set me to considering the direction of my life more carefully. It led me to consider my aim.

What do I want Future Me to be, do, and have?

I decided that I wanted to aim for the greatest good.

I wanted Future Me to realize all the potential that Future Me’s could realize.

But what was that direction?

What came to mind was something that I had read nearly fifty years ago. I was working my first job in Omaha, Nebraska, a bachelor guy living in a motel on an expense account, doing work as a civilian contractor to the military-industrial complex.

When I wasn’t working, I read.

I was taken with the writings of Neitzche and was reading the Stuart Walter Kauffman translations. (Memory had served me wrong. It was Walter, not Stuart. (Thanks, Google!) Stuart Kauffman, I remembered, had been at the Santa Fe Institute and had written something I’d read a long time ago “At Home in the Universe.” (Thanks again, Google!)

In “Thus Spake Zarathustra,” Nietzsche argued against the existence of God, thus: “If there is a god, how could I bear to be no god. Therefore, there is no god.” That’s how I remembered it, and that’s pretty close.

I liked a lot of Nietzsche, but that line never sat right with me.

The idea that I was “no God” was not unbearable, but it was troubling. T

Therefore…what?

There is a god?

And so my direction is…

I decided to aim in that direction. That meant: I wanted to become the closest possible approximation to God—as I understood the idea of God.

I wanted to do the best job that I could of becoming an incarnation of God. God in a mortal body.

Sound like anyone you know?

It seemed like an excellent aspirational direction. Even if I don’t get very close to the goal, it’s the right way to head.

Timeline

That took a while.

It’s now 5:31 PM. Hours spent getting here, with diversions and digressions along the way.

But I do feel profoundly satisfied.

That’s my aim.

I feel that there is beneath this decision is an important underlying truth. And I expect to write about it another day.

I just have to remember to do it.

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