What's it all about?

In everyone’s life there comes a time when the various strings of our intentions become unmanageable, usually brought on by our first compelling confrontation with the fact of our own mortality, and a fundamental principle of life is sought to assist us in sorting out what is actually important for us to complete in our remaining time, from what should be set aside as ultimately unfulfilling.

A significant problem that we encounter in choosing a fundamental principle within which to operate is the question of whether a principle that appeals to us, and our predilections, is in fact, a ‘True’ principle.

If we spend a long time sincerely studying this question, and its possible answers, we eventually arrive at the conclusion that both the question and the answers are meaningless because, in every case, the True-ness of the answer will depend on which point of view that we approach it from. Whether this is a result of the nature of reality, or the nature of the language that our mind ultimately uses to perform such work, this is invariably the answer to the question.

In this work, I don’t propose to provide a ‘True’ principle that the average person can depend on for sorting out what is important from what isn’t, that is to say a principle that is universally true. Instead, I intend to propose a principle that, when understood, will strike the average, and well-above average, person as being capable of satisfying the requirements for a functional, fundamental principle that the adoption of which will result in a fulfilling and fulfilled life.

The principle that I will describe and illuminate is the principle that I arrived at in the course of my own search.

We might now ask what constitutes a fulfilled life, and what is the virtue of fulfillment over, say, success?

This question becomes somewhat easier to answer if we first ask when this answer will be important to us?

Whether one is successful or not in any particular endeavor is far less important when a person is young, because when you are still young it is no major problem to simply start over, what with having lots of time left to obtain success.

However, as we get closer to the end of the road, each failure represents a greater chunk of the time remaining to us being spent without obtaining the sought-after rewards of that chunk of time spent. In other words, the time spent was wasted, at least as far as achieving our goals.

This leads us to believe that success or fulfillment will be progressively more important as we get older, and more specifically, as we run out of time.

So, what is success?

Success is fulfillment of ones objectives, whatever those objectives happen to be.

Then, what is fulfillment?

Fulfillment is success in the objectives that one should have pursued if they knew what successes would result in one being able to pass from this life knowing that one’s time was well spent.

At this time, a cartoon panel comes to mind, which regrettably, I am unable to find a citation for. A very old man lays on his deathbed, surrounded by a large crowd of obviously tearful and loving family and friends. As the old man breathes his last, he has a final thought, which is memorialized in a thought bubble over his head. In his final moment, he thinks to himself “Damn, I should have bought more crap!”