The truth is not always beautiful, nor beautiful words the truth. — Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching
For as long as I can remember, I was plagued with some form of existential crisis. I always felt burdened with questions like; What the exact purpose of being was? What was the true meaning of existence? And whether there was any such thing as an objective truth? I must have spent so many sleepless nights questioning what purpose my life held if I will someday be forgotten.
Being a curious kid while growing up, I never passed off an opportunity to ask some of these questions, especially when I thought I could get away with it. I would question my parents, my pastors, Sunday school teachers, and even grownups with whom I was opportune to have conversations with. And as you may have already guessed, I did not receive any satisfactory answers.
If I wasn’t critiqued for asking such daring questions, I was told to be a good boy, believe what the bible says without question, and pretend like the world made sense. The first was hard, the second even harder, but the third was easy. If I was going to pretend like the world made sense, I would have fun doing it.
But despite my best efforts at feeding into my hedonistic proclivities, these questions kept nagging at me, like an itch that just won’t go away. In my struggles to find meaning, I…
