Ancestry 33 - Existential Queries: Our Lives

The life of every human being deserves more than sporadic appeals to fate or the unwilling or passive submission to the chances presenting themselves along the way, and which, as pointed out, amounts to a renunciation of all resistance to forces exerted from one direction or another, a suppression of creative thinking, and a depletion of the will and spirit. Despite its relative insignificance within the wider human landscape the individual life is unique. One can argue that nothingness in a sense contradicts uniqueness. This contradiction is indeed latent in our existential concerns, especially when evaluating life and querying its meaning. With the exceptions of the geniuses and the great personalities of history, who, in their lifetimes, acquired fame or accumulated power or wealth or both, because either of inherent talents or inherited privileges, and whose paths left a notable trace in history and their theories and praxis contributed into universal knowledge and the progress of civilisation, on the other hand, the uniqueness and value of the lives of common people will bear no ecumenical witnesses and recognition in posterity. However, this does not necessarily contradict our individuality and uniqueness, even when the only witness of these attributes is our own conscience.    

Here are some more truisms: the existence and consciousness of any human being appears fleetingly on our earth, for a few instances of historical time, a drop in the vast ocean of living and dying souls. It traces trajectories parallel or intersecting with other beings and their minds through an inconceivably complex web of interpersonal and social relations. The unique being, whose body and mind is bearer of the legacy of previous generations, that is, the knowledge they accrued and the material things they created and left behind, perceives and captures moments of his existence through consciousness, enriches it and moulds it into a life. Beside the fact, as one can maintain, that individual life is at large hetero-determined and shaped through relations and interactions with other beings, influenced in its behaviour and actions by the social environment and milieu.

Answering the who am I, striving to obtain a sense of my being and existence –for as long as I am in the here and now, immersed in the world, as they say, should begin by chronicling and examining the lives of people I was related with in a way or another, probing into their minds and conscience, and, further, recounting the experiences of the places and societies where I grew up, was educated, fell in love, worked, lived. My very being in its nowness and place in society is determined by events that occurred in the deep past, well before birth, and until the present moment. This existence can be discerned, dare say justified, and acquire a recognizable meaning -exclusively within and for me (often sufficient for all intents and purposes), by simply recollecting the experiences of the past I had in the societies of contemporary fellow human beings. This recounting of individual experiences, along with the attempt via conscious reflection for an elementary understanding of the wider social environment hosting my existence and the parallel historical process, both prerequisites for the understanding life, add value to my own life and those who left or those I will leave behind when my turn comes; little value, the truth is, but nonetheless finite and for the eye of the beholder. If anything, while I write and whatever I write cleanses the soul of the taints of everyday life and grind the unconscious over long spans immersion in the world with many trivialities and vulgarities.