image courtesy of billolen

I spent a few hours at the American Museum of Natural History yesterday, and between marveling at the gemstones and beautifully illustrative dioramas, I visited the exhibit on evolution. I saw models of wee furry people, skulls of multiple sizes, and a clear and detailed explanation of heredity. And in one of the videos, I heard a sentence that got me thinking:

Without evolution, biology would simply be little more than a kind of natural history stamp collecting.

I’d never really considered this before, but it struck me as both true and perfectly obvious once I’d heard it. Without a bigger story to infuse bits of knowledge and experience with a plot, there is no meaning to anything we do. There may be enjoyment in the moment, but if there’s no framework, there’s no sense of filling out a picture or advancing a cause. There’s just collection and consumption.

In the past, external forces provided this framework. Organized traditional religion told us to do good in the here and now to be rewarded later. Western individualism sprang from the Enlightenment and gave a different meaning to life: humans were meant to control nature and enjoy unending material wealth, so all of our hard work meant pushing forward into a new future.

But many of us no longer identify with traditional religion. Nor do we buy the notion that we are here simply to learn how to dominate nature and experience comfort. Our frameworks have been shattered, and many of us live lives in which the details add up to not much.

At this point in our history, we need to think about what our new framework of meaning will be. What is the picture we are filling out? From what skeleton of values do we wish to hang our future?

When we answer these questions, then the minutes that make up the hours and days and years of our lives can mean more, can point us in a direction with intention, can be made sense of as a whole story, rather than a collection of moments.

What is your framework? Are you collecting or building?