and then?

i was strangely told that i was a philosophizing person the other day. and, this was a friend of my parents, who has no knowledge of this current little blog. of course, i smiled politely, but i didn't take it as a compliment, even though it seemed well-intentioned. i didn't take one single philosophy class during school - to me, philosophy is arcane, full of recursive contradictions, and whatever conclusions, if any, has no bearing or application in real life. perhaps there is an argument somewhere that it advances culture, but other than writing books that no one understands, i mean, what do philosophers really do?

rejecting a label is one thing, but i decided to wiki it in any case. philosophy: "the study of problems concerning matters such as existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind and language". this sounded a bit too close for comfort. well, i knew maybe a tenth of the names in the entry, and have not read any of the books it referred to (online excerpts at best), so as far as i can tell, i'm pretty sure i'm not a philosopher.

but still, suddenly, i found myself in a weird position, spending a bit of time on a subject i had disparaged for much of my life.

the intention has been to come to some understandings about the big questions in life. sure, many are probably inconclusive. but how inconclusive? where do we get stuck? what do the disagreements boil down to? i wanted to see what i might find out, armed with a little free time, access to a computer and some books.

but to refine things, the question i'm actually trying to answer is: and then? what happens when we take everything to extremes? and then what now?

somewhere along the journey of the and-thens, hopefully, we catch little fluttering bits of wisdom.