10 Things (I Think) I Think About the End of the World as We Know It (and I Feel Fine)

Methodology

Haphazard, spurious, unabashed dabbling. LOL.

(But seriously, folks. Thank you. I’m here all week.)

My methodology is that of a seeker. I make a distinction between seekers and searchers (more on this in Hypothesis #8: But everybody hurts [searches].). When I use the term “seeker,” it’s hard for me to avoid thinking of Quidditch¹² Elizabeth Lesser’s book The Seeker’s Guide: Making Your Life a Spiritual Adventure.¹³ Via her web site, she describes the book’s “four landscapes of the spiritual journey” as such:

• THE MIND: learning meditation to ease stress and anxiety
• THE HEART: dealing with grief, loss, and pain; opening the heart and becoming fully alive
• THE BODY: returning the body to the spiritual fold to heal and overcome the fear of aging and death
• THE SOUL: experiencing daily life as an adventure of meaning and mystery

It is the latter landscape that may be the most applicable to these particular musings. “Experiencing daily life as an adventure of meaning and mystery.” This, too, might sound “footloose and fancy-free” but, in fact, it requires discipline — mental, emotional, physical, and metaphysical. It taxes in those ways. It demands an ecumenical and open-minded, -hearted, and -spirited commitment to inquiry — with all the ambiguity and uncertainty that implies. Applied toward information studies, it means the process of “information retrieval”¹⁴ is a qualitative end in itself. It also means any query has a context that transcends the limited task at hand. The mindset of the inquirer entering into that querying process makes all the difference. Is she aware of that context? And yet, does he know what he doesn’t know (so to speak)? Is she comfortable in that liminal space of knowing and not-knowing? For a good seeker, the answer to those questions is “yes.”  

One valid critique of my so-called seeking is that it could just be dilletante-ism. In fact, I think it probably is. (I’m a Libra, after all; Libra’s dabble.) Or at least a lot of it leads nowhere, and it requires an awful lot of doubling-back and/or lost and (seemingly) aimless wandering. Making “meaning and mystery” out of the liminal space is always the real aim. More than anything, seekers seek a perpetual climate of possibility.

NEXT: Untested Hypothesis #1: Reading is the new writing.