Monday, April 5, 2010

The Unattainable Goal

Tony's post about the big Truth always being out of reach makes a lot of sense to me. I liken the big Truth to having an a final goal in life: even the most far-reaching goals I have for myself are far from being the final goal of my life. That is, once I reach them, I will only find more along the way and the cycle will continue. If one were to accomplish everything one could possibly set as a goal, what would be the point of living? Where would one's inspiration to live come from? If we were to discover the big Truth, would we not stop searching for truth altogether?

Furthermore, the smaller truths we find in life are like the goals we accomplish. For example, my goal on Sunday was to finally find the aerial tramway I'd heard about in the Magdalena mountains. For a few hours, the singular goal in my life was to hike out to the most likely location (turns out it does exist) and hike back. And once I had done so, I still had many other goals for myself. Similarly, when we find a small truth, there are still many more to be found.

Any thoughts on this analogy?

1 comment:

  1. Sounds a bit like Aristotle. he was really content finding the interesting connections that could be made here in front of us. Plato was more concerned about the perfect tramway, the essence of the experience, the meaning of finding theat tramway :-) I think

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