Of Friends, Fuzziness, Fun and the Fount of Creativity

It has been a long week for me, tackling various different issues at work. What a welcome relief it is to be able to finally sit back, relax and reflect, by writing my weekly blog article. I should have written this earlier this morning but I've been catching up with some old friends over lunch.

Sometimes social activities would disrupt my weekend routine of writing and reading but it's a welcome change. Exchanging views with friends is a great learning experience. We all see life from different perspectives and our own views could be narrow and parochial without us realising it. Simply listening to other people would sometimes force us to reexamine our own beliefs. 

When it comes to the subject of religion or spirituality, everyone resonates to a different set of vocabulary. Those with an engineering or scientific bent would like to think and explain in terms of 'energy' or 'states of mind', which I admittedly have a tendency to do too.  Those who have a more literary or poetic disposition would tend to be receptive to a language that uses words like 'love', 'glory' or 'grace'.  The former speaks to the intellect, the latter, the heart.

I have friends who claim that they are not spiritual at all.  But they all have fallen in love, gotten married and have an idea of what makes a 'good life'. They all appreciate, to various extents, beauty in music and art. To me, when you are capable of love and beauty, you have already entered the spiritual realm. We are all, like it or not, homo spiritus.

We become spiritual the moment we start questioning the meaning of our existence. The need to love and be loved, is the germ of the spiritual impulse. When we admire the vast beauty of the blue ocean, or a view of a landscape from a mountain-top, we are seized by a feeling of awe and grandeur, and ultimately, a yearning for something higher.

There must be something more than this; some grand scheme of things where we are a part of. We long to be connected to it. This hunger for meaning and transcendence--is this simply a quirk of the human intelligence, a spandrel of evolution, almost like a useless by-product?

Or is it our real nature--the driving force behind evolution itself? Something like Schopenhauer's concept of will or Hegel's geist? Any philosophical explanation of the world has to be expressed in human language. And there's where all hell breaks loose. 

Words are never truly objective. Every word has a fuzzy boundary--almost like an electron, which has a position defined probabilistically. We kind of know--or intuit--the meaning of a word and what it most likely means. But no two person can see the same bulls-eye. 

For every word, our 'meaning clouds' do overlap, but when we have many words joined together into sentences, the final outcome could convey something very different in the minds of the speaker and the listener. 

Listening with an open mind means that one is aware of the fuzziness inherent in language and is constantly readjusting one's conceptual framework to accommodate different possibilities.  It is the fuzziness of language that makes it fun, and ultimately serve as the fount of creativity.