Perhaps I read too much. I do so because I am curious. I am curious for answers as well as because I need validation for some thoughts and questions I have. I read and ask questions, and do searches and look for input from many sides. More often than not I don't get validation but more questions on what I hoped would be validation.
I rarely find the answer I hope for and often find more questions leading to an answerer that opened up an entire other room of questions. That leads to my always finding few question truly answered as simply as I would like or even fewer still what I hoped would be simple solutions to direct question that turned out to be not so simple nor quite as direct as I thought it might be.
It confirms what I have found through the process of questioning, taking in an answer and digesting it, leading to another more pointed question that opens up all of this all over again in a much larger scope than I thought possible.
Now if I have confused you then try to be a part of my mind that never wants to sleep, that always wants to know more, that questions, questions questions.
I once read that a mind that thinks is a curse, I believe that. Would it be so simple to just accept what you are given and never question? For those who like me with a mind that doesn't rest it is indeed a curse, but I know of no other way, I have always been so cursed. But at times it can be a wondrous thing leading to areas of knowledge you would never have explored.
There are a couple of things I have come to accept these many years, a formal education is not a prerequisite to having an insatiable curious mind and I have come to the conclusion that no one has the absolute truth and few people even understand the concept.
We who have minds that refuse to rest are not immune from fooling ourselves, we do it quite often. I do find when we discover we have fooled ourselves we know now it is time to again question why we allowed this to happen. Now my friends we may become a bit insufferable and arrogant at times but this can keep us from becoming worse.
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Mary Elizabeth Williams
Sourie de Campagne
Sirenita Lake
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Frank Apisa
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Kind of scary to think that lots of us have a mind similar to yours. I too wonder how peaceful a life it would be to not question anything much at all. I know lots of people like that in the churches I have served and they seem genuinely happy. To me, though, that seems insufferably dull and infinitely boring. It probably seems that way to me because there is no way I can get to that peaceful place. And I'm not sure I want to go there.
My brain is forever scaring the hell out of me, making me accept and then discard any number of paranoid thoughts; and any number of hypochondriacal fears. Now that I really do have a serious medical problem and one that the specialists have no real solutions for I find that the last thing I am is a hypochondriac. Who knew?
One short story: before I went to seminary at a very old age for a beginning student, 51, and was looking forward at what I would learn during those three years, I was haunted be the thought that the odds were excellent that Sue and I would likely be broke when I graduated. We were. But that's not the story.
What I told myself to keep me going was that finally I had come to the place where I could get the answer to a question that had plagued me for decades. For me it was THE question. The fancy name for that question is the issue of theodicy, ie: why is there evil? I remember when that rabbi, what is his name?, wrote the book on bad things happening to good people. I thought the book was about "why bad things happen to good people." I rushed to the library and read it. I was very upset when I read it because I was no closer to the answer. Then I read the cover again. It said. "WHEN bad things happen to good people." He didn't know the answer to theodicy either.
That didn't help my toothache though and I was determined that seminary would hold the answer. Three years later I was no closer to it. Today I am no closer to it. There are somethings that I am convinced we are NOT SUPPOSED TO KNOW! Maturity, I am also convinced is coming to believe that. I haven't quite gotten there yet. But there is hope. I'll only be 70 next month. Plenty of time. ??
Very good, thought provoking, post.
Monte