Life, Defined

Sometime in my early twenties, soon after learning about them, I began having epiphanies. It might be interesting to wonder if this was something like learning about the Doppler Effect or the writer's rule of "write what you know" or similar names and concepts where once aware of them, they tend to be all over the place, or it might just be that I had finally aged enough to have them.

Most likely, it was a combination of the two since nothing is as binary, as black and white, as I often wish.

In any case, it was only a matter of hours after having any of these understandings of the workings of the universe dropped on my head that I began doubting them. Not doubting that I had them, mind you, but doubting if they were, in fact, worthy of being called epiphanies. Sure, I suddenly and finally had an insight into how this world more closely resembled my idea of heaven than it did of hell or how asking the wrong questions led to unsatisfactory and bewildering answers, but I wasn't convinced these were true epiphanies.

As far as I knew, they may have been basic understandings that everyone else was born with, that they had no need to discover, that they grasped and shrugged off about the same time they learned to distinguish their right from their left.

There's no doubt they changed my life, that I considered such awakenings as momentous, but I was unhappy not knowing if my life defining moments were actually worthy of the name. On the one hand, any event that defined life for me was, in and of itself, pretty damn important and noteworthy, but it irked me that I could never tell if it was universal and genuine or just exciting for me in particular. Not having anyone else's mind or experiences, they became another in a long list of things, like love or anger, that I named after what I imagined others felt without ever truly knowing if my experience and theirs had anything in common at all. Sure, I called them the same things, but were they ... really?

As it turns out, I can never know. What I'm wondering now, instead, is that having a series of these moments might be what we call maturing. I haven't thought about it much -- the idea never occurred to me until this past month -- but it may be possible to make a case that having epiphanies might be what separates the wise from the masses, and it's only a unexpected side benefit that this would put me in a distinct class of humanity.

Or it may just be, as I've long felt, that getting older just means you have more experiences to draw on and recognizing the similarity between things that no one can have at age twenty just means you're old.