As the world changes and the requirements of living progress, the truly impressive thinkers must come to terms with the need to present a multitude of repeating lives in one body.
I’m not getting metaphysical here — I am merely stating a fact of living in moments — and this is not an easy thing to conceptualize because it means starting over from square one over and over again in order to change the intent of your life and to move upward.
Our parents were trained in the opposite methodology… “Stick with what you know.” “Become a master of one thing and the work will follow.”
Those ideas are no longer viable within a technological age that is compressive and bending and where, as the Great American Playwright Eugene O’Neill said in 1923, “the greatest problem of the 20th Century is the failure of science and technology to replace the death of the old God.” I will dare to amend O’Neill’s brilliance by suggesting “the greatest problem of the 21st Century is the failure of the mind to replace the death of the old life.”
In today’s marketplace of eating and breathing things change too quickly to slot yourself into a niche of expertise because you are only creating your own demise into irrelevancy. In order to survive we must be brave enough to confess we will never know enough. We need further mastery. We must learn something else and something else and something else. We cannot remain immobile.
Knowledge carries a foreboding future because the longer we live the less we know and the less we know the more we know we need to know. This vicious Mobius Strip existence is the curse of living a modern life. We are always starting over, never going backward but never traveling far enough ahead that we can stay there without beginning again.
Lives are no longer a means to an end. Life is a never-ending starting and within that module is the warm and comforting pause that with the crest of something learned comes a fulfilling of the mind’s promise and an expression of intent hitherto unimagined and unbeknownst in the darkness of our stasis.