The Big Why

I think we all ask the fundamental questions at some point in our lives.

We have to. We exist and so we have to wonder why. Why are we here? What is our purpose? What will happen when we die? Those who know me well, know that these fundamental questions of life/existence/purpose have been a source of...turmoil for me ever since I was a child. I remember when I was a kid, couldn't have been more than six years old at the time, I was sitting on my living room couch late in the evening sobbing my brains out while my parents tried to console me. "But WHY?!" I kept asking, insisting on an answer. Why is God infinite? Why do we live for eternity? Why can't we just die and be done? A bit of an existental crisis, no? In retrospect, though, I think these were perfectly logical questions for a child to ask; for anyone to ask. Everything is so defined, so definite and factual in our world. At least we like to think so. We like facts and statistics and formulas. Evidence is the highest level of proof. But we have no way to prove answers to any of those questions. And so sometimes, even now, I get overwhelmed by the thought of it, of everything. Of the fact that we exist at all, and what that means.

Lately, I have found more interesting to me, and perhaps more relevant, is that we all, ALL of humanity, we have these thoughts/feelings/intuitions that there is a reason that we exist, that we have a purpose in this existence. I'm not talking about evidence of God or a Creator; that is an entirely different blog. But just the notion that our existence, apart from all else, is purposeful.

I am in a certain position in this world. I am American, which denotes a certain privelige. I am a VERY light-skinned African-American, White and Native American (mulitracial) person. (Don't mistake this descriptor for a celebration of lightness in any shape or form; it is just an indicator that I have been perceived as white most of my life.) I am a woman. I am in my twenties. I have a college degree. I am married with three children. I stay at home with my kids and my husband works a management position in retail. We could be perceived as a middle-class family. All of these indicators place me in a certain status, socio-economic perhaps, on a national and international scale. However, these indicators say nothing about my spiritual maturity. They give no notion of how I feel about my life and my purpose. They say nothing to the crying six year old or the existential crisis.

That is why we are all united. Because we share a common humanity that is divisible only by our willingness to make it so. And at each moment in our lives, we are asking derivatives of the basic whys. For example, perhaps our momentary crisis is not, "Why did God put me on his green earth?" but, "Why did God put me in the PLACE?" Or "How did I get here?"

I am trying to answer some of my whys, some of my fundamental questions, by giving myself purpose. Or at least creating paths for myself to investigate that purpose. The blog is an example of that. Trying to determine why I am here, I have decided that I have a voice and a love for writing that seems to express that voice. Through my blog, I am able to think through my whys and begin to develop action. Writing is one of my actions. And it enables me to speak to you and to myself about the things that matter to me.

What is your why? And how will you use action to answer it?