Hope

Last month I wrote about fear. Over the last couple of days, the opposite side of that coin, hope, has been much more on my mind. We can see the results of losing hope very easily, and it is truly an unhealthy person who has lost all hope, but that's not what I've been focusing on.

Hope hides in plain sight around us every day, and I don't want to miss it. It is possibly THE fundamental building block in mental wellness, and it transcends our physical existence. It allows us to be more than we are. You can tell the people who have hope apart from the people who don't, although many might think I'm being a little subjective. There's much more to this subject, but I will come back to it later.

Writing

Been writing a bit more. I think that I'm finding I prefer science fiction over fantasy fiction, at least from a writing standpoint. I wrote about 1500 words of a short story that I think is going to end up probably about 10000 words long. It's work that I really like doing, and who knows, I might actually make some money off it one day.

I've actually been thinking about generating a website that has a portion of my writing on it. If enough people read it, and if I put some ads on it, I might actually make something. I'll have to make lots of very short chapters so there will be a lot of page views.

Wisdom

I've been considering wisdom, actually the pursuit of wisdom. I've looked for an underlying theme to the pursuit of wisdom, and I think it can be summed up thusly: The pursuit of answers.

In the book "The Hitchikers Guide to the Galaxy", Adams addresses a point that I really agree with. One main theme is the answer to Life, the Universe and Everything. The answer ends up being a monumentally disappointing 42. The computer that figured out that answer then explained how hard it is to understand the answer if you don't really know what the question is. The question had been so undefined that the answer was completely useless.

Yogi Berra once said "If you don't know your destination, any road will do". If we extend that logic to this situation, we might say that if you don't know your question, any answer will do. We know that that is not true though, as there is an idea of a correct answer. This being true we can say that if you don't know your question, there is no right answer.

So I think the beginning of wisdom or enlightenment is a search for good questions. Define the question that you want to ask with expectation that any answer that you do finally come to will be useful to you. I think that you will also find that if your question is really well created, it will lead to a good answer, and thusly a better understanding.