Wherever you see Greatness, somebody took risks and embodied Faith. (previous title)

Greatness is relative.

No matter how great something might seem to be today, it may very well be a part of something greater tomorrow. Chopin’s father may have been a masterful musician, but we do not hear of his personal greatness, for we hear instead of Chopin.

There is an alternate way of seeing things: that to elicit greatness in others is greatest of all. Through this lens, we might acknowledge that Chopin’s father deserves great credit for raising a genius. A noble thought, and certainly valid in many respects.

A trailblazer’s greatness rarely lies in his personal ability. You will find guitarists who can do everything Hendrix did, and more. Fighters who could kick Bruce Lee’s ass, even at his peak. Many modern philosophers chuckle at the silliness of the ancient thinkers. I think this happens because we fail to consider context. We don’t know what it was like back then. Or we forget. Hendrix, Bruce Lee and Descartes are credited not for their incredible skills, but for the remarkable amount of ground that they broke. What they did was amazing at the time they did it.

It’s hard, if not impossible to see the true source of something. There may be no true sources- it’s something we make up to feel better about ourselves. We shudder in awe at the magnificent elegance of e=mc^2, but forget that Einstein was standing on the shoulders of giants such as Newton and Maxwell before him. (The “shoulders of giants” quote is attributed to Newton, who, in the words of Neil Tyson Degrasse, was one of the greatest baddasses of all time.) Maxwell unified electricity and magnetism, which is arguably the greatest discovery in scientific history. No Newton and Maxwell, no Einstein.

Allow the idea to bounce around your mind long enough, and I believe you too may come to the provisional conclusion that it’s impossible to think of “things”, or ideas (or anything at all, really!) as distinct and independent. After all, does Chopin’s dad really deserve all the credit for Chopin’s success? Who WAS the greatest guitarist of all time? (It depends on the context.)

But really, we can never be too sure. And we shouldn’t be. People are complex. The world is complex. We try to simplify things as much as possible so that we can make sense of them, but it is clear that there will always be complexity that is beyond our understanding- simply, perhaps, because its complexity exceeds the complexity of our own minds. (Still, the battle endures. We surprise ourselves.)

Indeed, knowledge, ideas and wisdom, like all other things worth jumping into, appear to be a part of a larger, continuous and ongoing process. You cannot truly make sense of anything without considering what went into it, and you cannot truly appraise the value of something without knowing what it might lead to.

Information Overload

Now, we can never know everything about the past, and we will certainly never know everything about the future. There is simply too much data to process. You could spend your entire life simply trying to figure out what’s the most effective way to figure out where to start!

To act, then- (the mere act of living, mind you!) requires, (quite remarkably, to me) an element of faith. I don’t mean belief in a personal father-figure deity watching over you, granting your wishes and making your bed in some cushy afterlife. That’s unnecessary. (I think feeling loved, wanted and needed is a very real human need, but we can fulfill that need terrestrially.)

It is, however, necessary to have faith in yourself, and the universe at large- that whatever you are doing or saying will not be completely inconsequential or irrelevant. That you aren’t spending your entire life pushing against a door labelled ‘pull’, that your contributions matter, somehow.

Faith is embodied, not professed

This faith isn’t something you need to profess. No. You’ll never have to speak a word of it to anybody. It doesn’t need to be shared in the open, or put through an amplifier. You don’t need to write books about it. (Although this seems to be a rather common consequence.)

Faith, I have come to believe, whether religious, spiritual, humanistic, existential or whatever you choose to call it, is something you embody. I demonstrate the faith that I have in myself, in you, in humanity and in the universe, by the mere fact that I chose to write this, and to publish it.

It is an act of faith to believe that it might mean something to somebody someday. Perhaps it won’t. I’m willing to take that risk. If I did not have that fundamental, rudimentary faith, I would not have acted at all. To live without any sort of faith seems impossible- perhaps it might happen if one were utterly nihilistic- and even that is a state that’s difficult to spend a lot of time in, because remaining in that nihilistic state often requires a degree of faith in yourself, in your own belief in the validity of your interpretations.

I’m guessing that people who can’t find that sort of faith end up hurting themselves, or hurting others, or driving themselves mad. That said, I think many people get by without even questioning themselves. Without questioning the validity of their own assumptions.

So whether you’re religious or not, chances are you have some degree of blind faith in the validity of your own interpretations. This seems to be an in-built quirk in the human psyche- perhaps because it takes a lot of energy to question every single assumption, and for hundreds of thousands of years, existential queries can’t have been on the top priority list for survival. Our ancestors didn’t have time to doubt themselves. Thanks to heavy agriculture and industry, we now do. Joy!

Consider this- suppose you indulge in self-harm, self-hurt, self-loathing. Even if you hate yourself and want to die, there is a part of you that is doing the hating– and that part of you believes that it is valid to do so. It believes that it has the right to condemn you, to make you feel guilt, and shame. There is a voice in your head that describes you as unworthy, and you are willing to listen to that voice. Somehow, that voice’s authority goes unquestioned.

You don’t know you, so you can’t hate you

Extreme existentialism, I find, leads you to apathy and inaction. You can’t even really hate yourself, because you don’t have the authority to do that. You don’t believe yourself when you tell yourself you’re full of shit, because who are you to talk? Neither compliments nor insults mean anything, nothing is inherently meaningful. It’s a difficult loop to get out of. (I think the only way is to pay attention to the loop- or to have your attention directed to it, by a friend or a professional, and then decide that the loop is undesirable, and should be transcended.)

To choose reason requires faith in reason. To choose, at all, requires faith in choice.  (To claim disinterest, to believe in fatalistic determinism- still requires faith that it always holds true.)

To live requires faith, whether you like it or not. Since it’s inescapable, make it count. I don’t believe that everything’s going to work out in the end. I don’t believe that there’s some sort of happy ending waiting for us. I don’t believe that there needs to be one at all. I think all we have is now, and that we have to do what we can.

I have faith that we are similar enough that we could relate to one another, that we could make sense of one another. We are not that different, you and I. We were built from similar specifications. We are capable of wondrous things, individually, and together. We have not yet learnt how to live together, and how to love, but we can and will figure it out. I have faith in that. And having acknowledged that faith, I can act on it, towards that lofty goal.

There will, of course, always be the eternal loneliness of the inability to share one’s innermost states with another- but at least we can both relate to that loneliness.

I have my inexpressible thoughts and you have yours, but at least we know that’s something we have in common. We may be eternally lonely, but we can be together in our loneliness. And that makes all the difference.