Et lux in tenebris lucet: and the light shines in the darkness

Man is a creature that seeks meaning- alone among our fellow creatures it is humans who are able to seek and find meaning in the events that befall us, the relationships we find ourselves in, and in our intimate proximity to the natural world. For many of us, the importance of meaning is made vivid only in its absence. Unless we find some pattern or significance in our lives, we fall easily into ennui, nihilism or despair.

In this series of Olios, we will explore a variety of meaning seeking vectors and strategies, seeking in each attempt to push past the limits of analytic language to arrive at an awareness of what meaning seeking is, in the way we live our everyday lives. This is what lives at the heart of our search- the act of seeking meaning is a bid for increased awareness. The search itself contains the seed of that which is sought-it is like a lamp that once lit automatically dispels darkness; it what lamps do. But this is not easy. In order to seek out meaning in circumstance, we must grapple with randomness and we must confront difficulty.

Session 1 | The Black Swan: “The future has always been crazier than we thought.”

In his book “The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable” Nassim Nicolas Taleb describes events, either positive or negative, that are improbable yet when they happen they create massive consequences. We are of course in the middle of one now. Our world is shaped to a far greater degree by Black Swan events than by all of our planning and predictions. History is not a linear progression, no matter how much we imagine it to be so. It is a series of dramatic, world-changing events-that seemingly come out of nowhere-separated by vast stretches of dullness and predictability. But even these random events- though they may have no meaning in and of themselves, offer an opportunity for what Nietzsche called amor fati- the love of fate.