Arbitrary (Repost)

Meaning in life is arbitrary.
Why ruin the universe with rigidity?

Why do we make the choices we do? After all, we do not have unlimited freedom to do things. We find ourselves constrained by our gender, our race, our economic circumstances, our personalities that were shaped both by genetics and the random processes of life. Furthermore, we find that other people have their own ideas of what we should be doing, and they constrain us still further.

A person born into one culture will have entirely different options than one born into another. They may both lead valuable lives, but they will most certainly differ in many respects. The meaning that they find will come from different palettes. We cannot say that one person’s life is more valuable than another’s.

Of all the people who have lived, have any of them been truly “better” than another? We see in their lives only the exercise of preferences, not differences of inherent meaning.

All meaning in life is arbitrary. It is not tied to god, family, or self unless we define it as such. Nothing in life gives us meaning in and of itself. It is we who assign meaning to objects and relationships. We all try to make the structure of our meaning pretty, but in the end, there is no escape from the feeling that it is all arbitrary.

It might be better not to ruin the universe with our own patterns.

Deng Ming-dao, 365 Tao

arbitrary

1. Determined by impulse rather than reason; random; chosen for no reason

usage note: Something is arbitrary if its value is not determined by anything but choice.

Something mysteriously formed, born before heaven and earth.
In the silence and the void, standing alone and unchanging, ever present and in motion.
Perhaps it is the mother of ten thousand things.
I do not know its name.
Call it Tao.
For lack of a better word, I call it great.

Being great, it flows
It flows far away.
Having gone far, it returns.

Therefore, “Tao is great;
Heaven is great;
Earth is great;
The king is also great.”
These are the four great powers of the universe,
And the king is one of them.

Man follows Earth.
Earth follows heaven.
Heaven follows the Tao.
Tao follows what is natural.

— Tao Te Ching, 25

Even the name Tao is arbitrary, because we are trying to create meaning out of something that has no meaning. Tao simply is.

Do you think you can take over the universe and improve it?
I do not believe it can be done.
The universe is sacred.
You cannot improve it.
If you try to change it, you will ruin it.
If you try to hold it, you will lose it.

— Tao Te Ching, 29

Tao warns us against trying to “take over the universe”. I certainly learned that lesson when I tried too hard to tell friends what they should or shouldn’t do and ended up losing the friends instead, deservedly so. I’ve learned in my garden that some things simply aren’t going to grow, that this isn’t the right place to try and grow them. They may be beautiful plants in other places, but not here in these conditions. A good gardener learns to respect their climate and soil and grow what works.

These days I leave things alone as much as possible and let them be the way they want to be. Life is a lot easier that way. I think we would all be much happier and our lives would be far richer if we would let others simply be who they are, without trying to exert our own controls or societal pressures on them.

“If we are to achieve a richer culture, rich in contrasting values, we must recognize the whole gamut of human potentialities, and so weave a less arbitrary social fabric, one in which each diverse gift will find a fitting place.”
— Margaret Mead

“It is utterly false and cruelly arbitrary to put all the play and learning into childhood, all the work into middle age, and all the regrets into old age.”
— Margaret Mead

“Be just and if you can’t be just, be arbitrary.”
— William S. Burroughs

“All media exist to invest our lives with artificial perceptions and arbitrary values.”
— Marshall McLuhan

“To divide one’s life by years is of course to tumble into a trap set by our own arithmetic. The calendar consents to carry on its dull wall-existence by the arbitrary timetables we have drawn up in consultation with those permanent commuters, Earth and Sun. But we, unlike trees, need grow no annual rings.”
— Cliff Fadiman

“We surround ourselves with arbitrary and artificial limitations, and then blame them on the gods” — Anonymous

So much of what we allow to limit us are simply arbitrary choices, often ones made by other people for us when we were far too young to understand why those choices were made. At some point, we have to take the responsibility to look at those choices and see if they really fit with who we are, or not. There’s nothing wrong with living your life in a certain way, with whatever restrictions or limits you want to accept. Realizing why your life is the way it is, and the choices you made to make it that way is a lot more mature than just bemoaning the way things are.

(Reposted from September of 2005)