Being Where I Should Be

It's been a while, hasn't it? I managed to spend some time in SL a couple of months ago and a few hours last month, but RL absolutely kicked my backside during the summer and is still doing it. Short on sleep, short on time, too much to do and not enough people to dump it off on in order to grab some badly needed sack time. "May you live in interesting times" was an old Chinese curse and it makes me wonder who I might have pissed off in some previous incarnation. But enough blather. Suffice it to say that Fergus is still alive, though seldom online.

One of my annual rituals is to sit through every episode of Babylon 5, including the movies. The series has been dead and gone for several years now, but it ranks among my favorite three or four shows. I sprang for the DVDs as soon as they were released and make it a point to watch them all once a year. I've often wondered why I found the show so appealing and have come up with many different reasons. But one of the major ones that keeps coming back is that it has more moments of "hmmmm..." than any other entertainment series that I've seen. Moments of "hmmmm..." are those moments when a character says something, typically just in passing, that makes you sit back and go "hmmmm...." Almost all of Straczynski's (the creator/writer of the series) characters have moments of "hmmmm...", but they resonate at different points, depending on what's happening in RL. That's why I watch them again and again.

One of those moments of "hmmmm..." hit me this year when one of the characters said something to the effect of we are always where we need to be. It was meant as a restatement of the old adage that "when the student is ready, the teacher will appear." But at this particular point in RL, it made me wonder just what it is that I am supposed to be learning. Am I the student or am I the teacher? Or to put it in Straczynski's terms, "why do I need to be here?" as opposed to someplace else.

The premise behind this idea is that there is a purpose to the universe and that we, as beings within that universe, have a role of some sort in furthering that purpose. While the whole concept of a purposeful universe is debatable, I'm willing to simply accept it for the nonce. It's undoubtedly an ego-thing. If there were no purpose to the universe, then as a part of that universe I would have no purpose aside from existence. "As useless as tits on a boar hog" as my old drill sergeant used to say. And it would surely gall me to no end if he turned out to be right. But once again, I digress (I do that a lot, don't I?).

So, if I accept that premise, then the question remains. If I am where I need to be, what is my purpose in being here? I suppose that there already is a sufficiently large number of other Micks floating around out there, so converting beer into urine is probably not my "raison d'etre" (would that it were - I might actually have a shot at Nirvana this go around). By the same token, I doubt that any of the other things that I do occcupy a high spot on the universe's "to do" list. So "why" remains an unanswered question. It is sufficient to the moment to merely accept that I am, it is and the rest is yet to be discovered. And perhaps that is all the answer there ever will be - I don't know. But in the search, which is more important: the answer or the search?