Into every adventure seeps a desire to be noticed. No matter how pure the intentions of the adventurer, the appeal of having someone intently watching and interested in us is an undeniable constant. We do it for a story down the road, for a laugh today, or affection afterward. Ultimately, attention drives a big part of us.

Biology by its brutish nature has programmed us to occasionally sacrifice personal comfort for social glory, improperly weighing the costs for today and the payoffs tomorrow. People famously have maimed themselves, done daring stunts, and wasted it all for the eyes of their friends. Yet aside from select group situations where an uncomfortable impetus to action is required, that desire is out of context. Worse yet, left unfettered it grows into something much bigger than peer pressure to perform a stunt. When the audience expands from close friends, to acquaintances, and finally to people you do not even know, the simple need to be valued in our circle becomes a complex demon of significance that must be wrestled continually to the ground. What initially began its life as a suggestion on how to spend a moment becomes a demand on how we spend our lives. With something to prove, we relinquish control of ourselves to the proof.

At the heart of every glorious act is agency. Without the ability to choose one’s fate, even sacrifice becomes an unwrapping of time rather than a heroic action. But if our adventures are the result of a festering lack of self-worth then what have we done but surrender to repressed instincts and loitering pain. For our actions to have lasting value, they cannot be motivated in any part by social crutches for a crippled identity. Given the fact that this significantly reduces the draw of doing anything “sweet”, the only logical next step is to yearn more. It’s not that dependence on the external is an unreliable foundation, it’s that it’s no foundation at all. Meaningful lives cannot be built on expectations of others as much as they cannot be predicated on selfishness. Until you can convince yourself that you’d do it even as an illiterate mute (with no charades skills), maybe it’s too early.

Meaningless lives can be satisfying, fulfilling, and full of joy. Without self-awareness, no strict demands are made of actions aside from an eagerness to believe them decent. Through history, people have felt pretty good about some pretty awful things. So one of the bigger crimes of religion these days is to let miserable saps like myself play deaf to the voice of God only to create for him a voice from our melted down ambitions and recycled morality. Confession and repentance lose their value if you cannot properly examine your own heart to see anything evil that resides there. Because it’s not just exciting trips overseas that are affected when it becomes possible to pray to a carnal wish to become a whole person.

“I would have stopped, but I was pursued by something. It always came upon me unawares, taking me altogether by surprise…for nowadays the world is lit by lightning.”

~ Tom in The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams

One of the things that sets us apart as human beings from the animal population is our ability and propensity to establish connections between the things we perceive. With minimal observations and a past experience with a similar stimulus, we can infer a vast amount of information (with decent accuracy) about something new. We can store it, catalog it, and recall it at will. Once a connection is born, it also aids communication. “It’s like getting kicked in the balls TIMES TEN!” “Ah, I gotcha.”

The biggest problem with connections is our insistence on using them. They’re so prevalent that our entire language and thinking and memory is couched in the inference that they exist for everything. And that’s ok, until you stumble upon the undeniably frustrating experience of something that is so different from everything else that it cannot be connected reasonably to anything else. Most people will encounter these things in conversations where the potential for connections is limited by shared experiences. It’s not that our minds can’t wrap themselves around the idea, it’s that we can’t “push” it out to someone else. Like explaining programming to an artist. Or digging holes on other peoples’ land to the cops.

But the mother of all these incommunicatable ideas is one that defies our futile attempts to tether it down and contain it in our own minds. It’s like a neutrino that shoots right through every bit of matter in the brain. It comes and it’s gone, and all attempts to recall it mine as well be folded before they begin. It clearly happened, but it won’t happen again. And because we exist as spiders that walk around our network minds, tracing connections to arrive where we will, the inability to jump beyond the established is what keeps us from being truly creative as people and laying hold of the ideas that lie outside of our reach. Our capacity for the growth of our webs is capped by our potential to experience new things in the real world, then cut down again by a frustrating insistence that new ideas must remain close to old ones. Most, it seems, prefer not to jump far from what they know. All, it seems, rarely experience new things. Humanity progresses at a snails pace by choice then by nature.

I think these neutrino ideas are occurring all the time. And if so, the ability to create ideas is purely dependent on the size of our nets and how far we are willing to jump off base in order to grab another speck as it flies through. Most will never give it a shot, strangely comfortable being naive by insisting they’re not. Conquering the instinct to preserve sanity is the challenge. What’s it worth remains the question.

Be careful though. Sometimes a jump across elevation is an irreversible activity.