I've been thinking about goals lately, and not in terms of accomplishments or possessions or any of the other usual list items.
The more I question myself about what it is I really "want" and what makes me feel "fulfilled" the more I am aware of my obsession with understanding the world around me. This is a lifelong thirst and can never possibly be quenched. Which is good, actually. It's the kind of "reason for being" that will always be there to get me up in the morning, a mountain whose peak I can never reach or even see (and if you think I'm mixing metaphors now, just you wait).
Speficially, I want to understand the forces that capture us, that shape our lives and our destinies - historical forces, social forces, economic forces, political forces, genetic and evolutionary forces, astronomical forces, quantum forces...it's as if we're all born caught in a vast, multidimensional web of innumerable invisible forces that bind reality together and propel it forward, and we spend our lives desperately trying to learn the contours of one or two of these invisible forces, like walking tightropes while blindfolded, except the ropes are constantly shifting, the patterns and pitfalls continually making fools of us as they rearrange themselves so that what is sure footing one day becomes treacherous the next. History repeats itself, until it doesn't. People behave a certain way, until they don't. This political party is fighting for me, until it's against me. One day it's atoms, the next it's vibrating strings. Genes are selfish, or do they cooperate? Remember where the rope was yesterday, but keep your step light or risk falling off completely.
I'm seduced by the idea that there are deeper patterns, though, than are dreamt of in our current philosophies. Perhaps as we collect still vaster amounts of data, the larger, intersecting networks will begin to emerge. I'm not sure if we are learning more or just forgetting less, but we have more wealth of observation, and tools for recording data, than previous generations could begin to fathom. More data in the past ten years than in the previous 4.3 billion. What are the possibilities? What could all this data lead us to understand about these forces? Is everything quantifiable? Not just nature, but history? Human behavior? Society? Love? Hate? Can we amass enough data, and quantify enough of these forces, that we would be capable of predicting or even replicating our whole reality all over again based on the right equations, even down to the last neutrino, in a way that encompasses everything from the empire state building to the inevitability of me kissing my wife for the first time on 51st street? I hope so. The optimist in me dreams that there's a sort of clockwork to it all, and I want to someday catch a glimpse of it.
