My design is to pass over easily, and not laboriously, the remainder of my life; there is nothing that I will cudgel my brains about; no, not even knowledge, of what value soever. I seek, in the reading of books, only to please myself by an honest diversion; or, if I study, ’tis for no other science than what treats of the knowledge of myself, and instructs me how to die and how to live well.
Excerpt From
Michel de Montaigne (1533 – 1592), “The Essays of Montaigne — Complete.”
There comes a point in almost any adventure when it’s time to subside from the electricity that so often accompanies the initial enterprise. This is not to say there is no vibrancy sustained. There are nonetheless only so many times one can go about the globe before the familiarity of even the most frantic or exotic environment begins to wane and the heart is unwittingly drawn to other horizons above and beyond what is before one’s eyes. Nor do I think it is a melancholy zeal such as described in Ecclesiastes 12 King James Version:
5 Also when they shall be afraid of that which is high, and fears shall be in the way, and the almond tree shall flourish, and the grasshopper shall be a burden, and desire shall fail: because man goeth to his long home, and the mourners go about the streets:
It is instead a luxury accommodation of the unhindered mind, the privilege of reckless thought or capricious idleness. The superlative condition of which I speak so vaguely is that inscrutable condition attending aging. With the same forceful but contrary energy of youth, aging endorses an era of gratification which is pleased to be associated with isolation and indolence – though in fact it is but a tranquil focus upon what comes out of the earth and beyond rather than what we pretend to put into the same. To be clear, all the intelligence in the world is not about to profess or contain any supportable fact (that is, in the state of incontestable purity or rigidity). Thus having the assurance of perpetual disinformation or illegitimacy, we may at the very least content ourselves to waffle in the more persuasive rapture of casual and vacuous regard.
If you find this preliminary conclusion either inaccurate or distasteful, there is a quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson,
The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.
You may however feel disinclined to be altruistic at the price of your private contentment. Perhaps the point of life is to have a purpose – a sensation often heard among those recently retired from employment. It is though an ambition as regularly rejected on the theory that it perverts the entire point of retirement. In light of such circular logic – and at the risk of making an inductive leap – I choose instead to rely upon my carnal instincts. That natural option (which historically so dignifies the “fight or flight” adage) is to me the apt decision. It reflects what I perceive through my limited intelligence to be a truly workable forfeit to life’s erstwhile swirling comparisons and incalculable riddles.