Look! You are looking. What are you looking for? Sense, meaning and pur­pose? Well then you have come to the right place. Pur­pose aplenty you will be encour­aged to look for your­self for your own unique, one-in-seven-point-three-eight-bil­lion, pre­cious life. I can only share my sto­ries. Here they begin.

There was a time when «web­sites» didn’t exist. Any­body having some­thing to say, or at least thinking they had, and not con­fi­dent enough for a pam­phlet nailed to a church door or the printing press or the radio, would have to resort to a scrap of writ pinned to a tree or fence.

What if one of those fos­sils who grew up just before the dig­ital rev­o­lu­tion came to realise how empow­ering it could feel to pub­lish some­thing for every­body con­nected to the world wide web to see. Though by nature of unob­tru­sive char­acter, this fossil, say a cute Acan­thostega, would realise that he had the desire to share some infor­ma­tion and have a dia­logue with like-minded deep sea crea­tures, would go ahead and pur­chase a domain and put some stuff there. Nat­u­rally unas­suming, the little Acan­thostega, let’s call him Gunter, would pre­sume that its ram­blings could stay there for weeks or even months without get­ting noticed, other than maybe by a few deep-see-trawling web bots straying in and over.

So what is this, asks the bot,

• someone trying to flog some­thing? a glo­ri­fied busi­ness card, like these uber stylish ones that you merely scroll down end­lessly these days and the con­tent trans­forms in a riv­eting fold-up fanfold?
• or more like a trading place, prof­fering some hopeful or deluded or just boring com­mer­cial product or ser­vice or ser­vice sourcing a product or dis­cerning among sup­pliers of a ser­vice offering a product, or a rating scheme for ser­vicers of an offering of assur­ance about the quality of a ser­vice deliv­ering a com­par­ison between product schemes, or what end­less busi­nesses iter­a­tions people come up with in this sat­u­rated, depraved sphere?
• a media outlet for cur­rent affairs, reports about ongo­ings, news and devel­op­ments, a mag­a­zine of reflec­tive or even opin­ion­ated com­men­tary? Typ­i­cally one-direc­tional with someone of the calling of jour­nalist or blogger or vlogger or gnogger or what you call these clans of indi­vid­u­al­ists, with optional comments?
• another one of these swooshing social media self-aggran­dis­e­ment initiatives?

Of course it could be any mix among these.

What the clever bot may not think of is that maybe our fossil is an upwards learner, not pre­senting fin­ished wisdom, not sulking over who or what it was not able to become, but stretching to what it is not yet, before time runs out. Thrilled by new abil­i­ties, new heights, new depths of meaning. New ele­ments. Air. Land. Trees. Moun­tains. Glac­iers, sliding back into the depths.

Now just think for a moment that Gunter is desirous of a bit of recog­ni­tion, after having scaled the height of a moun­tain he cannot name; not any­thing like “look how gor­geous I am”, just some per­cep­tion of “isn’t this fas­ci­nating”, or maybe even “if there is all this world out there, all this poten­tial, all this thought, all this heart, all this pur­pose strewn out to be grasped, let’s start and build up some­thing together”.

Sure Gunter could just get a social media pro­file or two or forty. But tech­nology and design dic­tate the format and ways of expres­sion. An Acan­thostega is a some­what slow and pen­sive crea­ture. It cannot chase some ephemeral “likes”, retweets or get­ting “favour­ited”. It cannot quite squeeze its rev­e­la­tions into 160 char­ac­ters. It is not punchy, witty, pop­ular, gor­geous, just humble, gentle, incon­spic­uous, yet grandiose.

An ancient emperor Tik­taalik who wants all the wisdom of his empire recorded in writing issues a decree to all wise late Devonian lobe-finned amphibious tetrapods to col­late every­thing in one volume, and they gather for sev­eral decades and come up with a 15-metre wide ency­clopaedia of tomes. The emperor is impressed and pleased but wants this abridged, so he issues another decree to whittle this com­pendium down to the ulti­mate essen­tials. Another horde of wise fish spends years, to come up with a three-volume lex­icon of absolute wisdom. The emperor is not sat­is­fied, he wants it shorter. Through sev­eral more stages and episodes each lasting years, finally the greatest minds of that empire come up with a single phrase that con­tains all wisdom, and that one sen­tence is: “Just do it.” Won­derful. Awe­some. Tweet­able. (Also mean­ing­less glo­rious vanity, laissez-faire and free PR for a major sports brand. So this can’t be it.)

Gunter still believes it has some­thing to say – deep, murky mur­mur­ings of unfathom­able rel­e­vance, half-baked con­vic­tions about “eter­nity” and meaning, moonlit insights into silver-tongued seas that tell without cease to how­ever has ears to hear truths as deep as I can bear about who we are and why and how we can be truly ful­filled and achieve our pur­pose. Untweet­able, the twitchy sparrow of the day does not sing of such things, the merle may, as it beholds the liquid silver of the half moon, if you find leisure and muse to listen with intent.

Already it has exploited any fellow fos­sil’s sta­mina to cling to a mental thread, to scroll a wheel, when all they care about are the latest flashes and whizzing sharks passing by and lethal drag­nets anni­hi­lating stretches of seabed.

Regard­less, Gunter shall punch in with its clumsy primeval digits, the things that its small but capa­cious heart burns to share and its wits cannot bear with­holding. If any fellow soul of the deep may not think Gun­ter’s sole inten­tion must have been to waste away time, it may respond.

“I may be small and insignif­i­cant”, thinks little Gunter as he wad­dles clum­sily through the unknown jungle, “but I do not forget my cre­ator’s instruc­tions, to follow his path to life.” A little sun ray fol­lows the Acan­thostega as it wad­dles on.
(Ps. 119:141, John 8:12)

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