The Same Question

A few days ago, I once again heard Pink Floyd’s Time and found myself thinking about those lyrics.

Which, naturally, led me to Socrates.

And then to Ecclesiastes, Henry David Thoreau, and the rather unsettling realization that human beings have apparently been worrying the same bone for thousands of years.

Socrates famously argued that “the unexamined life is not worth living.”

Ecclesiastes asks, “What do people gain from all their labors at which they toil under the sun?” Generations come and generations go. The sun rises and sets. The rivers keep running toward a sea that is never full.

Thoreau went to the woods because, as he wrote, he “wished to live deliberately.” He wanted to encounter the essential facts of life rather than reach its end and discover he had somehow failed to live it.

And then Pink Floyd plugged in the amplifiers.

Time describes something painfully recognizable: ordinary days frittered away, the assumption that there will always be more time, and then the sudden realization that years have disappeared while we were waiting for someone or something to show us the way.

“You missed the starting gun.”

Different centuries. Different worlds. Different understandings of God, death, the self, and what constitutes a meaningful life.

Not the same ideas, exactly. But a recognizable uneasiness: we are here, our time is limited, and it is possible to let a life pass without paying much attention to it.

Apparently Pink Floyd didn’t settle the matter either.

Today we talk about mindfulness. Intentional living. Finding our purpose. Being present. Living authentically.

We have books, podcasts, retreats, therapists, spiritual teachers, life coaches, TED Talks, and apps that remind us to breathe.

We have accumulated several thousand years of human wisdom. And we are still asking.

What is a life for?

Am I actually living mine?

What deserves my attention?

Is there something beyond what I can see and understand?

Maybe the interesting question isn’t why we haven’t found the answer, but why we keep asking.

We usually think of questions as things that need answers. A question creates an uncomfortable empty space, and we would rather fill it. Perhaps we hope someone who has gone before us has figured it out and left instructions.

But what if their value lies partly in their refusal to stay answered?

Maybe the question stays the same because we don’t.

An answer that once helped us make sense of our lives may no longer fit. We lose someone. We fall in love. We grow older. Something we thought we wanted turns out not to be what we wanted at all.

The question returns. This time, it asks something different of us.

There is a remarkable passage in Ecclesiastes that says God “has also set eternity in the human heart,” while acknowledging in the same sentence that we cannot fathom the whole of what God has done.

I find something strangely comforting in that. The longing and the not-knowing are allowed to exist together.

We still have to answer as honestly as we can. But there is room for an answer to be something we live with, rather than something we settle forever.

Sometimes something brings us back to the question.

A poem can do it. Music can do it. Scripture can do it. The natural world can do it. A philosopher dead for two thousand years can do it. A work of art can catch us in the middle of an ordinary day and make us look again at a life we thought we understood.

I had heard that song before.

This time, it stopped me.