What Is the Fiction That Lives You?
Tell Me Your Fiction and I Will Tell You Why You Write
To fully embrace and live life we need a fiction that sustains us, gives us meaning and purpose. Not fiction in a negative way like “untrue” but fiction as related to the Latin root fictio or “to fabricate” — what we fabricate for our psyche — the Greek word from which we get our word “soul”. This fiction is the fabrication of our own experience of our existence, a construct (fabricated, made) for how or what we find as meaning for our life. A good example comes from Socrates. He was invested in the idea that the soul (as a Greek he would have been saying psyche) was eternal and went to great lengths, time, and energy to construct reasoning as to why this was so. In the end he reflectively acknowledged that it was one of his obsessions that the psyche was immortal and that if his conviction turned out not to be true he would in no way regret all the time he had spent seeking to gain more insight.
Your fiction may be that telling a great or entertaining story is meaningful. Maybe your fiction is that being a good teacher, parent, soulmate lover or moral person has purpose or use. Perhaps your fiction is that research using the scientific method has meaningful impact. Maybe your meaning is connected to improving productivity, popularity, relationships, sex life or connecting better with the universe and caring for nature as we know it and for you that has substantiated usefulness. Your destiny may be with philosophy, metaphysics, religion, medicine, technology or engineering and you have constructed fiction around which the use of your life has purpose for you. Maybe you are an artist seeking to represent essence. Of course, we have no way of knowing if any of these things truly has meaning. If for some unexplained reason our sun went supernova today obliterating the solar system would anything anyone is doing have intrinsic meaning? We can not and do not know.
I read and write (mostly journal) daily — and I do not really enjoy doing writing — my enjoyment of reading ebbs and flows. After I typed that statement I thought to myself — if you don’t like it then “why do you read and write?”. I don’t “like” writing because, among other things, I am painfully undisciplined, creatively self-centered, inventively lazy and obnoxiously insecure. I do write because I joined an organization over 20 years ago for the purpose of ending an alcohol drinking addiction (for me it worked) and as it turned out the organization I joined suggested I deal with the defects listed above (and a list of other ones whose list would fill pages) by writing.
I do question who I am writing for? Someone, even if it is just myself, who is questioning and attempting to synthesize in written language the nature of the search and trying to form worthy questions about it. I am searching not for the cliché “why are we here” — but for the humbler and more pragmatic “WHAT are we here?”.
The search draws upon science, physics and astronomy. Also, the liberal arts — what does it mean to be human, what is truth, is there free will (really), what is the unconscious? We are unarguably part of a timeless seamless whole (God or no God). Perhaps we are a whim of a more intelligent civilization meaning our experience is their experiment. Perhaps we’re here alone and this is truly, improbably “base reality”. The list is infinite. I am thankful to the many disciplines we have as humans. By way of example, to astronomers I am thankful for all we have learned. By their work I get to question what are the chances we would have a moon that has a rotation exactly matching its orbit sequence, that there are more galaxies than the near countless starts in our own galaxy (this is new news, less than 100 years old). I get to wonder at the odds that there is a star exactly aligned to what we call north on our planet’s magnetic poles, and consider the countless conditions starting with supernova creation of the element table to make this a “Goldilocks” place for life and consciousness.
If I am fully awake, aware, in the moment and open minded it seems what otherwise would be chance encounters or coincidences provide clues. Nature talks if I will but listen. Art communicates if I will but give attention. The people I least expect to say astounding things do if I have ears to hear.
This is my one obsessive interest in life, the question of what are we, what is this? I treasure this experience. If I make no progress and it is altogether futile, I will not be disappointed or dissatisfied as this is the way I would invest my life if it were the last hour of my life.The value of relationship, and why I am so grateful for my relationships (which I am not that good at … and I have been blessed with more than I deserve) is because they exercise my best and most honest effort of assessment. It seems to me that relationships reveal more of the few tiny insights than I have gotten than any other way. This includes the relationship with myself (meditation) which I too often neglect.
As a final note I will add that, for me, mainstream media, internet social media, TV news, the NY Times, organized politics or religion, or the Washington Post or pop articles on how to change my life in 3 easy steps seem to have the lowest probability of providing clues as to what life is. Music, stories, seemingly coincidental occurrences with nature or other people in daily life are the richest sources for my fiction. It always depends in any given moment and to the extent I am wide awake.
