Puzzling Existence

" Existentialism " by  erix!  is licensed under  CC BY 2.0 . “There is only one really serious philosophical question, and that is suicide” ( MS, 3 ).  When I read this, sometimes it seems very dark, like we're supposed to focus on the suicide part of the sentence. However, I know there's more to it than that. There is sometimes a reason for the dramatic and in this case, the dramatic gets my attention every time. It's not because I am thinking about suicide.  I'm thinking about living. Living in a world that is hard. Living in a world where I am diminished. Living in a world where sometimes what I want and what I believe simply does not matter.  It does matter, though, and as I think about the question, I know that the answer changes. Every time I ask the question, I get a different answer. It's not because the question is different. It's not even because I am different. It's because the meaning changes. The meaning of what it means to live, what ...

The unexamined life is not worth living - I suppose any first year philosophy student has heard that one, right? Even so, I come back to it, perhaps because I heard it as an impressionable first year philosophy student many years ago. At 20, what do you have to even examine? Life has seemingly just begun and will continue for the foreseeable future.  That's not always true, though, is it? My husband lost a dear friend recently. He was 38.  Something like 700,000 people just in the U.S. have died in the last year and a half from the coronavirus. They have been young and old and everything in between.  Puzzles have been one constant in recent times. I found early in the pandemic that setting the pieces on the table, arranging them by color or shapes gave me a sense of direction and a way to order the chaos that was all around. Puzzles came to take on a greater significance. It’s hard to explain - maybe they always had this significance and I just never noticed it befor...