Found an old thought process the other day. Well, when I say an old thought process I mean one that has personal longevity. I can trace it back to when I was a small child.

There are truly big questions in life. We discover ourselves as sentient beings. pin pricks of consciousness located, like a spider on its web, at the hub of a matrix of impressions. We are recipients of sights, sounds, smells, tastes and touch sensations. Why?

Why has something gone to the trouble of creating or evolving such an incredibly elegant arrangement of apparatus, sensory technologies, and given them a physical location?

Add to that the fact of our own mortality and the enigma deepens.

This confluence of energies - comings, goings, happenings, and occurrences that we refer to, in an almost offhand manner, as our lives has a temporal aspect, it’s a ticking clock. From the moment we appear the only certainty for any of us is that we will, ultimately, disappear. Why is that?

Why not a continuing omniscience without the punctuations of stop, start, birth, death and the many apparent complications arising from that?

Is it part of a plan or a purely random happening? The known Universe, is it purposeful or arbitrary?

And what about that Universe? What is it in? And if it is in something, what is it surrounded by, what’s at the edge, what is the border or boundary like and how is it crossed?

We each come up with answers to the Big Questions as and when they arise in our lives, either by design or by circumstance, that we are personally comfortable with. Some are compromises, some are based upon faith, some are answers of convenience.

The big thing about the Big Questions is that they are removed from our direct sphere of influence. Where do we go when we die, where were we before we were born and so on are by their nature intangibles and lend themselves to semantics, theorising and philosophical ramblings.

An attempt to deal with them is not the purpose of this post, to posit the idea and say that it is a vital component of a well formed life that these Big Questions are visited from time to time by you is. Don’t be a stranger to the enigma and mystery of life, otherwise the tide of familiarity will swamp your being and you will be consumed by ennui. Whenever you are getting saddle sore from being on your high horse for so long ask yourself some of these questions, they have a remarkable ability to bring a person back down to earth.

Learn from the victorious Roman generals who paraded through the streets of Rome following a victorious campaign, accepting the adulation of the crowd. They had an attendant accompanying them in their chariot whose responsibility was to whisper in their ear, ‘Remember you are not a god, you are mortal.’

Let the Big Questions be your attendant, let them be whispered in your ear from time to time and you will realise that your wisdom is based upon first accepting that you know nothing.