Enlightenment is Awesome - "Pick a Little"

What is it about gossip?  About talking?  About telling the story and, more importantly, making our opinions known?  Are we, as Piers Anthony postulates, simply a machine to sort out the chaos of the universe?  Is the reason we search for the meaning of life, for the reason to live, because that is our purpose?  To find the meaning of that elusive molecule, life?  And the talking, the story telling, the drama and the emotions and the chemistry and the happy and the sad…  all of that is a way of analyzing?

Every creative thing, as far as I can tell, is a form of communication, telling a story, evoking an emotion.  Our histories are driven by emotion.  Our hopes for the future are all based on our emotion.  Heck, my life's goal is to be happy as is possible for me - totally emotion.

I have been writing and writing about how acceptance as the key to happiness, yes?  And I have been striving to live in an almost detached fashion, pleasing only myself, letting only my opinions and my judgments of myself be the truth of my life.  And one of those opinions is the annoyance with gossip, with talking about others.  With the need to fill the space with noise, noise, noise.  (There's a song from Alanis Morisette in which there is a few seconds of silence.  She prefaces it with, "Here, can you handle this?")  And so, it has been my goal to remove myself from the talking about others.  Partly, because the talking passes judgment, and mostly because it's really none of my business, nor the business of anyone else.  If someone wants to share parts of their life with someone else, they are welcome to do so.  But it's not my truth to pass others' words along.  Unless, of course, I am discussing how it impacted me.  And often I try to paraphrase.

So today, people are talking about some things that have happened to change their world and the latest reasons for the change.  And I find all these opinions swelling up inside me.  Whoosh.  Smash.  Wave after wave after wave!  And I so badly want to call someone so I can spill these opinions out into the universe, so my point of view can be expressed, even though it has absolutely nothing to do with me.  My opinion wasn't even asked!  Nor was assistance requested.  I am simply the recipient of news.

But the urge to talk to someone!  To share this news, to find an opinion that matches mine, that validates it!  It's a bit relentless. 

So I have to wonder, as Candace Bushnell might say, what is it about the story telling?  Why are we driven to talk, to communicate, to make much of?  Why does it fill a void?

Or does it really fill that void?  Is there something else that belongs there, some connection or input we're desperately trying to replace?  Is gossip, drama, creativity, like intercourse - a striving to reach that moment of pure bliss where we are no longer in and of ourselves alone, the place where we are existentially fulfilled?

I hope you have a great day!

-Lila

* the title comes from the title of a song in "The Music Man."