Existential...Crap

Waking to an insistent (incessant?) interrogative is better than any man-made mechanism designed to shake us loose from the dark. The philosophical queries of "who am I?" "why am I?" and "what am I?" are constant companions from my youth...or perhaps just from last nights binge party.

Growing up on the West Coast indulges the wondering questing mind. It's funny that a liberal population gives plenty of license to explore your personal existential unknowns (dilemma?) but not necessarily provide any answers. An exhilarating journey replete with sojourners without a clue where they are going and hardly a better purchase on where they have been.

Having spent the better part of a decade in Washington DC (living in perpetual crisis that I may be here for another) and traveling the East Coast I have found fewer individuals seeking clarity in the soup of personal justification, origin and meaning (with apologies to my liberal companions of the blue New Englanders). What do they know of that which  I am apparently not so blissfully stupid?
At the top of my cluttered intellect sits the concepts of predestination and the Protestant work ethic.

"Christ don't go all 'churchy' on us!!!"

Nope not me. I never write here to discuss politics or religion.  But have a care because within the burden of organized religion can be found a rationale for why some of us need to ask "who am I?" and others don't.

I envy the soul with faith. S/he has the grace of their particular god ensconced within their heart. From within the bastion of that kind of grace the faithful of god can overcome any challenge, sustain any hardship. At the end of their toil they resolve through their conviction to rise to the bounty that awaits. Faith is an unconquerable force.

As for me and my ilk, well, the many scurrilous vanities of intellect cannot and will not sanction devotion of any stripe, unless at the alter of empirical knowledge. It is likely that we will find the occasional nugget of brutal logical truth on our endless quest. But it is often a stark and clinical journey, sometimes less beautiful than that of the faithful.  But what of beauty? Is there in truth no beauty?

Faith or intellect: by which cane do you see?