Pop quiz. Why are we on earth? To

1) serve God

2) please our parents

3) support our neighbors

4) raise our kids

5) trounce our rivals

6) propagate our species

7) paint the Sistine ceiling

8) no good reason

9) haven’t a clue.

Herein the commencement of purpose but is the quiz ever popped? Not in my experience. Though often informed who and how to be, I was never invited to think it through. Lost, I stumbled on the question to fix my bearings, but the succeeding colloquy was private, between me and me.

Curious, isn’t it, that the thinking being (Descartes’ res cogitans) doesn’t think much about that? Launched into life, we descend like a pinball, bumped and flipped till we reach the exit hole and our score flashes, seldom debating, much less settling, this preliminary assumption. Who cares why we are? – we just are – next question?

Trial lawyers are taught to ask only questions they know the answers to. Ditto, res cogitans. Option nine humiliates us and we can’t risk Option eight. If there’s no good reason to exist, why bother? Options one through seven are fabrications to disguise our ignorance. Each of these imaginary missions elevates us to the hero of our story.

I have no idea why I exist. I’ve had some ideas along the way, versions of one through seven, which muted doubts, but I’m pretty sure my existence is a galactic accident, either lucky or unfortunate, depending on how one counts. We are… because we are – and sooner or later any trace of us, maybe our galaxy itself, will vanish, and that will be that.

Younger, such a conclusion would have dismayed. Pointless – poor me! In my antiquity (though not yet, I hope, senescence), it liberates. Pointless – lucky me! Whatever I accomplished was what I was meant to, q.e.d. And for all the things I didn’t get done, no regrets, since the whole caboodle’s headed for dust. My eventual nothingness exonerates. Happy days.

For direction, I trust heart, not head. Instead of charting my course, I feel my way. My feelings are hardly infallible, but they’re persuasive and the best guide I have. I want to, need to, write – what I’m writing now, it appears. I could have been writing something else, but this is what came. Where it came from and why I’m curious about this I may explore but can only guess. If I say God propels me, it’s the equivalent of Option nine, I haven’t a clue. I write – this – to you – because I feel like it – and if I do my best, no regrets. Hamlet ends up in the same place. “We defy augury,” he tells his pal Horatio,

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published there's a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, 'tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come: the readiness is all

I’ve been pursued all my life by the slavering hounds of Expectation, unkenneled by Pride. From toddlerdom on, I strove to be “King of the Castle.” I was never satisfied with my results because Pride is insatiable. I still feel Option five stirring in my dreams – “Trounce your rivals” – but mostly I’m at ease with my attempt. I will continue to give my all – the game’s no fun otherwise – but as long as it’s my all, neither excellence nor success are my call. “He did his best” is the only eulogy I aspire to.

P.S. Lagniappe. A friend sent me this advice from Winston Churchill, which I’d never heard and is too sweet and perspicacious not to share:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedIf you cannot read all of your books, at any rate handle, or as it were, fondle them, let them fall open where they will, read from the first sentence that arrests the eye, set them back on the shelves with your own hands, arrange them on your own plan so that if you do not know what is in them, you at least know where they are. Let them be your friends; let them at any rate be your acquaintances.