What's the Point?

Every once in a while I get a little philosophical. Not in an Aristotle vs. Socrates way, since I'm not intellectually inclined enough to even tell the difference between the two. No, this philisophical brooding is more in a "What's the point?" kinda way. Don't get me wrong. I have definite purpose and meaning in my life. Maybe it's the vision of that eternal goal that makes the day-to-day things seem so mundane. I can capture the big picture, but connecting the dots between the little things and what really matters in life that I sometimes don't get.

I mean, what in the world does doing the dishes have to do with self-actualization anyway? And when you add picking up after the kids (or worse, trying to get them to pick up after themselves), taking out the trash, and clearing off that clutter-sink that we sometimes call a "counter-top", it can get hard to see which part of Paradise these things contribute to.

Maybe its an acute case of abrupt acuity, the unpleasant side-effect from watching too much TV, and now I'm compensating for the braincells I lost by making the rest of them work harder. More likely (and less self-incriminatingly), my pensive preoccupation is because my life is in a transition state, which is probably the most exciting (and painful, if your a molecule) part of a reaction coordinate: it only lasts for an instant, but that's where all the action is! Either way, I don't feel like I've earned my sleep, so I'm up past my bedtime pondering the mysteries of the mundane and the life clutter that needs to be put back neatly on the shelf of eternal perspective.

The obvious answer is that some of these seemingly menial bothers are building perhaps the most important Paradise of all: the one I'm living in right now. But nobody wants to live in a landfill, so building my heaven on earth is going to require, among other things, loading the dishwasher, teaching the kids to clean-up after themselves, cooking meals ... and occasionally watching a little TV.