This is taken from the preface to the Pulitzer Prize-winning play Doubt by John Patrick Shanley:
"Each of us is like a planet. There's the crust, which seems eternal. We are confident about who we are. If you ask, we can readily describe our current state. I know my answers to so many questions, as do you. What was your father like? Do you believe in God? Who's your best friend? What do you want? Your answers are your current topography, seemingly permanent, but deceptively so. Because under that face of easy response, there is another You. And this wordless Being moves just as the instant moves; it presses upward without explanation, fluid and wordless, until the resisting consciousness has to choice but to give way."
I don't know if I like this depiction of human beings--it seems to imply that we never display who we truly are on our "crust." But I do like that Shanley's idea of everyone's "You", everyone's true inner self, is fluid, pressing, insistent, and conflicted.
This reminds me of what it feels to be alive; the times in my life I have felt the most alive were the times I didn't know what I wanted. One of the darkest, most emotionally draining times of my life was when I fell in love with a man while I was still in love with someone else. It forced me to rethink everything I knew of love, happiness, and meaning. I knew less than I felt I had ever known before--didn't know what to think, what to believe, what to want--but it made me feel so gloriously, tearingly alive.
Theodore Roethke wrote in his poem "In a Dark Time," "In a dark time, the eye begins to see." What could be darker than doubt, and what is seeing but finding meaning? When one is in the throws of torrential life questions, there is the presence of power. There is the sense that "this is what life is about". Questions and doubt feel real, right, because behind them is the thirst for meaning. And, as in Roethke's poem, sometimes we find meaning in our darkest times.
Of course life requires balance, and if we were always certain or always doubting, life would be either boring or miserable. The electricity created in the balance of the two creates meaning. Not knowing means there is something to search for, and finding meaning means finding satisfaction.
And, thus, this is what I hope for my life to be: a never-ending quest to find meaning in the meaning I have already found.
