As I approach the end of my life, I have even less and less interest in examining what have got to be very superficial evaluations or opinions about the significance of one’s life or one’s work.
– Leonard Cohen, 2016
Yes, whatever evaluations and opinions we have about anything and anyone are bound to be superficial.
We only scratch the surface. We don’t have the big picture. Nobody does.
Our evaluations and opinions reveal more about us than about the world.
Our evaluations and opinions reflect what has shaped us – our culture, experiences, biases, hangups, and so on.
Our evaluations and opinions are simply ideas that arise in the human mind, not inherent in reality.
Reality and life is inherently free of our ideas about it.
We cannot know anything for certain.
If we grow up in a family and culture that get this, we too may get this from an early age.
But if we grow up in a family and culture that do not quite get this, as most of us do in the Western civilization, then we may learn it through experience and with time. We get to see the limitations and flaws in our own evaluations and opinions. We get to see that the evaluations and opinions of others come from very limited perspectives and are based on very limited information.
It doesn’t mean that evaluations and opinions can’t be useful. They certainly can be. But they are ephemeral, based on innumerable biases, say more about ourselves than anything else, and are human ideas and not inherent in reality.
So what’s left? Life itself – how we live our life, what moves us, what’s here now. Perhaps that’s enough.