We were both born in the bloodiest century in Human history. Whether you take the road less traveled or the common path they both cut through the same forest. Left you go through scientific and technologic advancement that would virtually make us like Gods or the other path that promises the protection and enlightenment by God. Before choosing you might ask what is the true path. What is truth, what is my life? Does a life have a how? Does a life have a why? Against a backdrop of industrial revolution we faced alienation, dislocation, population on a mass scale and murder on a mass scale.
We eventually discover the constraints of truth whether metaphor or paradigm. In many cases an actual truth never existed. Look down from a great height and see the nexus of the great Human saga where we dared to trade the organizing bliss of good and evil, right and wrong determined by a creator for other opiates; Communism, Socialism, Capitalism, Psychology, Technology, any learnable system to replace myths that began to evaporate. The 20th Century my home but also into which each of you was born. For many a time for hope, liberation, possibility, for others abandonment and despair. A most human century in which we begin really that nature was right. We are beautifully, finally, achingly
,,,alone.

In this void, this cobbled philosophy at its worse becomes self reflecting, linguistic, semantic, relativism having rendered any discussion of right and wrong, left and right, good and evil to be the quaint concerns of another age. At its most provocative it asks other questions, those of finding our authentic selves and meaning seems to have died. Nothing less in short as why do we live at all. What makes us who we are and what in us is broken. They ask what now. And we are still asking it. What will fortify us is another century. Do we abandon the search for specific truths? Is truth and facts so elusive it is just silly to some?
The ethical, moral good principles that by definition can never be proved when so much now can be proved. Or is all this finally and forever pointless. Are we done? I s all that is real a reality show?
We can destroy cities all over the globe, alter the gas mixture of the atmosphere, dispassionately vaporize each other, create life were tere was none. All the while we are intoxicated with the possibilities ,te queston remains , how do we seek purpose and where do we hope to find it if we are so busy deciding there need not be any purpose, just as afraid.. We wander eyes closed to the powerful glare of the sun.
While, science, medicine, physics face the charge of Godlessness with less to guide us now than ever.
Seemingly omnipotent, but more human than ever and more afraid with more to be afraid about.

These quandaries do not end in this unread post on an obscure digital website. They begin in a human imagination. Perhaps yours. Those who question carry the light. The light is what we have taught each other through out our lives and even here in this tide pool of ideas.
Its been a wonderful 15 years. Lets not be strangers to everything we learned from one another.
May your best years be to come and so for us all.
Thank you.