When i was 5 years old i remember walking with my mother outside , maybe holding her hand, when some unknown cause made me look around at the world of street and trees and sky and birds and things and ask her:
"Mommm... who made everything?"
As we walked up the hill to our house, she looked at me, thought for a moment and helpfully answered:
"...Well... sweetie, God--God created everything."
I considered and sincerely appreciated this sincere answer but quickly uttered the next occurring thought:
"But who created God?"
At that point she looked at me and my natural curiosity again, thought for a moment, shrugged slightly and quietly offered:
"Well... well no one created God.
I think i repeated her statement aloud in a whisper while my subconscious processed the implication of her tone... Or maybe i was just replaying the sound and meaning in my mind because i was so consciously struck by them.
It was my first and clearest memory feeling an idea that was incomprehensible. And it felt impenetrable, but i had another feeling that it was important to resolve in itself and for my own small self to be satisfied.
So I tried to understand it.
The Mystery of Being
With child understanding I tried to understand...
How God could come into being without ever having come into being... I couldn't imagine it yet felt frustrated because "we exist and we came from somehere, so someone somehow got this thing started!!" I may have also have drifted off into trying to imagine what complete nothingness was if it was NOT empty space. But in short
I experienced the phrase: "It made my (little) brain hurt."
From 5 years old and everafter the mystery of being has haunted my mind with a simple explanation for its nagging persistence:
"How could it be otherwise?"
I still want to understand what i cannot understand.
Because i still have the ever-pressing feeling that the meaning of life is itself most-important to resolve and fundamentally essential to our satisfaction.
