The best experiences in life can’t be simplified. The best moments resist explanation. The best way to find meaning in life is to seek out the opinions of others who have found it! Usually other people have experiences they love which they want to tell you about. You can almost always find people who want to share their favorite movies, games, art, music, restaurants, foods, inventions, jokes, and more. People like to talk about their favorite characters, books, animals, geography, pictures, places.
An explanation of someone’s favorite TV show is never as good as watching it. The best art is often failed by explanation, it’s similar to how explaining a joke isn’t usually funny. The best of life has so much more to give than words can ever say. If a picture is worth a thousand words, maybe an experience is worth a million photographs.
What makes a joke good is that it needs no explanation. I think it may be that all the best things in life are like this. The best in life speaks for itself, lives for itself, being transparently obvious. You don’t need someone to make a video essay or a write up. It’s not necessary to read a book analyzing something you love, you already love it. In fact, it may only be because you love it that you can endure any explanation at all.
It’s impossible to explain why something is good. The explanation always falls short. The reason I’ve been able to write so many essays for so many years was because they always fell short. What’s changing now is that I’m embracing falling short of explanation, rather than challenging it. I’m learning to let life speak.
It may be that Goodness is what allows us to endure knowledge, not the other way around. The goodness is there first, knowledge actually distracts us from whatever it is which is so wonderful, it’s a mere shadow of the good. Knowledge can only ever be a distraction from the good, explanation is always in the shadow of the good. If you want to experience the good in life, don’t analyze life, live it.
To seek out the best in life, we may have to trust we’ll feel it when we see it, and have faith that if we’ve had an experience once, we may have it again. There is more than one good in this world, in this universe, there is infinite goodness and wonder, there are infinite best experiences, mixed up in all the mess and shit and chaos.
Maybe life is about enduring long enough to stumble onto that next great thing, to learn that when we find it we should simply try to appreciate without expecting any further understanding. Maybe we can let that feeling of quality be our understanding, just as we let laughter serve as the true understanding and purpose of a joke.
Explanations of the best books are never as good as the books, descriptions of wonderful music are not the music, pitches are never films. No explanation can ever match the true and full experience, all we can hope for is redirection back into it.
Some things we have to see with our own eyes, hear with our own ears, and experience with our own senses. It’s not about being present
It’s about being there