Living my understanding

I have been searching for answers as long as I can remember. I have notes scrawled on white, 3-ring-bound, college-ruled paper about my life as an 8 year old. At 13 I saved up and bought my first portable tape recorder where I could elaborate on my theories of the universe. Tape recorders evolved into dictophones, Palm Pilots, Compaq Ipaqs, and finally smart phones. Hundreds of hours of voice recordings over nearly three decades of me searching for the right words to explain this world, not to mention thousands of written and typed pages.

Since I started, I’ve repeated the cycle of asking, stating, qualifying, then changing, trashing, and asking countless times. Why was I never satisfied? Not just with my own theories, but those I read in books by philosophers, saints, scientists, and theorists? Something was playing a critical role in my discerning judgement, but it was very much left unspoken until only recently. I have been looking for practical applicability; essentially, I need answers that can help me live my understanding.

That is not to say that I’ve never practically applied any of the spiritual analogies I picked up. My favorite, that I must have heard around 4th grade, was about the three blind men describing an elephant. One said the elephant was long and slender like a snake, as he was grasping its trunk. The second objected, saying it was broad and hard, like a rock, as he was feeling its back. And the third said both were wrong, it was thin and flexible like a leaf, as he was feeling its ear. Of course the moral is that they were each partly right, but entirely wrong in contradicting each other.