Eudaimonia = Human flourishing
Disclaimer: This started out as a poem and I’m not totally sure if that’s what it remained as I continued to write, but that’s what I’m going to label it as.
This one is dedicated to my off-brand Canadian father, bearer, life-giver, instructor, role-model Jordan B. Peterson who introduced me to the phrase “true enough”. There are no absolutes in this narrow tunnel of reality our minds’ are granted, so true enough is the only thing we can use to describe what we think we know. The same goes for the language we have created.
The terms we use to “define” are just as close as we could get. I find this fascinating and disturbing, kind of like watching a zit explode, ya know. Also, the second article in a row where I pretentiously use the term Eudaimonia. I’m sorry I just really love the word so very much. It was a Greek word used by Aristotle to describe human well-being (flourishing). Anyways, on to the #poetry?
It seems I cannot escape the romanticized fantasy my mind has constructed for me.
Where Eudaimonia exists even though I’ve never tasted the sweetness it promises to drip.
The thing is, a word cannot drip shit.
It selfishly withholds an idea within the symbols it projects.
Nonetheless, I claw and squeeze foolishly believing honey will ooze.
Before my eyes, I see an entire world within a word,
A lifetime of promises embedded in the confines of a single sentence.
The sentence gives the word a life of its own,
An identity, and over time it’s ego expands; believing its definition can actually define.
Language is deceiving in this way.
It describes in absolutes and ideas that will always remain conceivable, not material.
A form of torture straight from Dante’s Inferno.
Dangling the desire right in front of your inadequate reach;
On the pages that you read and the stories that you hear.
Training your mind through dangerously unconscious habit that language defines the game.
Language is but a game within itself, my darling.
Only it wasn’t granted to us but created by us, ensuring its deceit.
After scratching and scouring, the blood runs red and the only thing that drips is true enough.
But alas, as we formed and fostered the word “true" independently, we became too eager about the ideas we thought it could penetrate.
With the hope of truth, there is the illusory comfort of stable ground to walk on.
Certainty covers our eyes, fully opaque
And we begin to run the race blindly,
Unaware that it’s just a game.
Even still, when the blindfold rips off and stability vanishes with the appearance of sight itself,
The only thing left to balance on is true enough,
And feet begin to stumble on themselves.
But sight can’t just be disorientation.
Although there may not be a pure sweetness,
A full, unadulterated image, to be devoured,
I know there’s something my eyes haven’t savored,
I want to taste it.
