Why?
Cy Whitling
Why am I spewing words into the internet? Why am I sitting here, tooting on my tin horn and hollering at the adults as they walk by?
The simple reason is because I am excited. We are all here, we are all alive and that in itself is reason enough to throw a party. We have all been given something more beautiful, more valuable and more incredible than we can imagine and too often we try to stifle that excitement instead of celebrating it.
You can stare into the fire and ponder "deep" things or you can do this.
We like to get existential, to sit under the stars and wonder about Things. We get all spiritually pretentious and emotionally constipated and devise elaborate theories for it all. We write books and argue and pitch little fits when we get called names.
Of course there is a place for knowledge-seeking and there is a time to ask questions but too often we ask them not because we want to learn but because we want to seem wise. We aim for "depth" and stub our noses on the bottom. We try to seem “mature” by becoming complacent and storing up useless knowledge.
With this excessive knowledge comes a distaste for excitement. These "mature" people don't get excited, they are never rendered speechless with awe, they are never overwhelmed with joy.
Life is crazy, are you going to jump in or are you going to pitch a fit because there is no lifeguard?
We make up questions because making up the answers to them makes us feel better. We are never content to be amazed, to be overwhelmed by this world that flows through us. We are never content to trust in the Truth and revel in the beauty around us. Instead we ignore the beauty and focus on ourselves.
This world we inhabit is incredible. We live in a place where rocks are piled miles high and people regularly die climbing them. We live in a world where fish glow in the dark and light and water make rainbows and people play video games professionally. We live in a world where Shakespeare can write his plays and Adams can take his pictures but you can't relieve yourself in the Amazon or something nasty will happen.
Why do we spend time and money going to the top of big piles of rocks?
We try to sugar coat it, we drape the porta-poties in lace and we relegate those scary mountains to our desktop backgrounds. We take the beauty and the terror and try to water them both down into some kind of bland mush and then we try to sell that as reality.
We live in a world that has sunsets and spiders.
Why? Is it just easier to be scared then stoked? Does success come when we flatten all the mountains or when we climb them? I don’t pretend to be wise, or even knowledgeable. I don’t do “deep” and I think “mature” is often just used as a euphemism for complacent.
I do know that writing things down usually has one of two consequences. Either the writer realizes that what he said is stupid and takes it back before everyone else can tell him so, or he leaves it and thinks about it and doesn't mind having said it.