Second Life
“We have two lives, and the second begins when we realize we only have one.”
I came across that line somewhere on the internet, and it hit me. Wait, what am I doing with my life? That’s where my way up began. The line was signed Confucius, but it’s nowhere in his writings. It seems to be a modern invention: in 2015 it became the title of a French novel.
We live a very narrow version of what life is, and we set those limits ourselves. We look through the wrong end of the binoculars and wonder why everything seems so small and far away. We got so busy leveling up our character that we forgot what game we’re playing. We went from butterflies back to caterpillars: crawling to work and eating on the way.
Then the binoculars turn around. Same view, but suddenly everything is close. And there’s only one of it.
My second life. The only one there was. The only one there is. Forever. And forever isn’t that long, because now I want every drop of it. Don’t put your dreams off. What else is it all for?
But how much of this life do you actually see?
Ultimate reality
A medieval missionary spent his life searching for the earthly paradise. He walked until he reached the horizon, where the earth meets the sky, found a spot where the two weren’t quite joined, stooped, and passed under the roof of the heavens. The engraving catches him halfway through: a pilgrim at the edge of the world, staring at the machinery behind the sky. For a long time people took it for a medieval woodcut. It was actually printed in 1888 by a French popularizer of astronomy, and its caption retells that same missionary story.
Before tearing the fabric of reality, let’s see how much we know about it. Our main organ of perception, the brain, doesn’t give us the full picture. We’re always locked inside our senses and our understanding.
Eyes, ears, nose, skin and tongue each pick up their own narrow band of signals. Visible light is a thin strip between infrared and ultraviolet. Bees see ultraviolet, snakes sense heat, and we get neither. We hear only part of the frequencies, too.
The brain processes what the senses send and makes guesses based on past experience. That’s where mistakes and illusions come from. And whatever happens outside our attention slips right past us.
Reality is a constant flow. At the subatomic level, particles behave against everyday logic. Time dilation, quantum entanglement: they break common sense. We see only a tiny fraction of what’s out there.
Our perception is a subjective, filtered version of reality. Good enough to get around, and that’s all.
Everything we experience passes through three lenses. The first is our senses. The second is the world we live in: its culture and its time. The third belongs to each of us alone: our own history, experience and point of view.
Ultimate reality is beyond our grasp. We live only its thinnest slice. And to fit what’s happening into our heads, we tell ourselves stories about who we are and what we do.
If it’s a story, you get to choose it. Rise above your life, and you get to design it, see it from above, decide what it will be. You’re the architect of your own biography, not its day laborer.
People have been telling themselves stories like that from the very beginning. We call them myths.