Why we're here

Greece is the word.

I don’t pretend to know a lot about Ancient Greece.

Sure, I studied some of the classics. But what really stood out to me about the Greeks is how wrapped up they were in their philosophy. While the Persians sent vast fleets into the world bent on conquest, the Greeks spent most of their time at home. People like Aristotle and Socrates were trying to figure out the meaning of their own existence.

“The unexamined life is not worth living,” Plato once said. And his words couldn’t ring more true today.

The Romans, who came along later, were certainly flashier. They embraced technology— building cities of concrete and all kinds of weapons of war. They were rabid expansionists, obsessed with stretching their Empire across continents and ruling over millions of people.

But they cheaped out on philosophy. Their arts and sciences were basically a Temu version of their Greek predecessors. They couldn’t even come up with their own gods, having to borrow and rename them from the Greek pantheon.

No, Greece was a special time and place.

I guess I’m thinking of those navel-gazing Greeks lately because I find myself in a special time and place too. I’m reminded of that every morning. The first thing I see when I come downstairs are the words my mother and I wrote on the kitchen mirror:

‘Stay home. See the universe.’

My mom is usually on her exercise machine, listening to a thoughtful podcast about spirituality, and energy and what it means to be a human being.

She listens to a lot of Edgar Cayce, a 20th Century clairvoyant, who had a lot of interesting ideas.

We’ve carved out our own house of philosophy. We have conversations about the purpose of our lives. We look at the patterns. Why do we act the way we do? How do we get past it? What are we learning exactly? We may never know, but it’s important to always be on the road to finding out.

Whatever philosophy I had studied in university is long forgotten. But here, we’re devising our own. It sure beats beetling through life, with our heads down, travelling the same well-beaten paths over and over again.

All the unexamined life I lived? Better to just throw it out. This is the stuff that really counts. The life worth living.

The best part? Like all good philosophers, our quest to to gain wisdom and forge new paths is borne from suffering.

“Everything you’ve been through,” my mom said, heaving at her exercise machine while Cayce’s words rang in the background. “Your addiction. It made your spirit grow so much. You wouldn’t be here if not for it.”

“We wouldn’t be here together.”