Pursuit

A thought I had — one grown to sup­port my own cur­rent what­ev­er — regard­ing incom­plete­ness:

Per­sons are by their nature incom­plete, and seek­ing com­plete­ness. In them­selves, in their insti­tu­tions. But at the moment one stops seek­ing, the moment one believes these goals of com­plete­ness are met, they are lost. Lib­er­ty, free­dom, jus­tice, love and hap­pi­ness are nev­er ful­ly attained and can­not be pos­sessed, like Heisen­berg’s uncer­tain­ty prin­ci­ple or Schro­ding­er’s cat, to know a thing is to change it.

So, the clos­est we can come to any of our desires is through pur­suit. The bond between hunter and hunt­ed. If you catch hap­pi­ness, you kill it. It becomes a dead thing. If you think you’ve attained the apex of lib­er­ty and free­dom, you’ve let them both go. But if you know that lib­er­ty, free­dom, jus­tice, love and hap­pi­ness can be yours in the con­text of pur­suit — and know that the val­ue we ascribe to these ideas is not inher­ent to them but exists only in the dynam­ic of seek­ing — they can all be yours.

This seems very much in tune with the point Camus makes in The Myth of Sisy­phus.

UPDATE 7 July 2013

There’s a dan­ger in the pur­suit too, a good hunter knows when to call off the chase. Some­times you can pur­sue one thing that turns out to be some­thing else entire­ly. Some­times the pur­suit itself changes a thing. Know­ing when to call off the chase is just as impor­tant as know­ing that the pur­suit is what mat­ters.