Watch a sunbeam
Magic!
The light reveals swirling dust, a hidden universe
Slip a jar under it
Close the lid
What do you have?

Nothing

 

Take a picture of a sunset. Can you capture the grandeur of the frameless experience?

 

A first kiss with a lover you waited for, or never even imagined you'd be with. It's you? It's you!

 

An idea that flows through your fingers, into your keyboard, and onto your page. I didn't write that! Where did that come from?

 

Among those countless stars are whole galaxies, each with millions of stars and planets of its own. Are we alone in this vastness? How could we be? How could we not be? Why are we here?

 

Love

Beauty

Truth

Art

God

 

These are a few of the Essential Absurdities.

Each is a conceptual carrying handle for something otherwise too big to lift.

We know love when we see it but when we begin to try to describe it, we spiral outward to infinity. 

If the past is gone and the future hasn't happened yet, the only truth is now—but if everything we sense takes time to reach us and more time for our brains to filter out or register, all we can see is yesterday's news. Can we ever know truth?

Ask anyone what God is—or what art is or what makes something beautiful. You'll get a different answer. If no one can agree on what something is, is it anything?

These are the Essential Absurdities.

They are essential to our search for meaning. Without them, we have no purpose, no direction, nothing to discuss, nothing to write about, nothing to talk about, nothing to teach, nothing to fight over, nothing to agree on. 

Perhaps the Essential Absurdities are essential in that they allude to the essence of something. We may not be able to capture a sunbeam but we can carry the jar home. Surely the air within it contains that invisible dust we could see when the lid was off. And that's the essence of it—something invisible revealed when the light was just right. Slap a label on the jar and there it is!

The Essential Absurdities are absurd. If they are infinitely abstract and impossible to grasp, why are we so driven to discover their meaning? If no one agrees on what these words stand for, how can we refer to them so casually? It's so easy to talk about a “loving gesture” or “getting to the truth of the matter” or how a chance encounter is “just God's way,” but if we don't know what we mean and can't agree if we think we do, why bother?

Without the Essential Absurdities there is just data.

Without the Essential Absurdities there are no stories.

Without the Essential Absurdities there is no meaning.

Our absurd-but-essential search for meaning is an innate component of intelligence (an Essential Absurdity on its own). Can we program a computer to search for and understand meaning when we don't even know what “meaning” means? Isn't “meaning” the biggest Essential Absurdity of all?

 

Watch a sunbeam
Magic!
The light reveals swirling dust, a hidden universe
Slip a jar under it
Close the lid
What do you have?

Everything!