Sooner or later, a pattern emerges. Sometimes we never see it emerging, and it ends in mystery – such as when people die before their illness can be diagnosed, or when a relationship ends before it can be understood, or when a species dies out before anyone even knew about it. Sooner or later, a pattern emerges.

So it is with man's search for meaning. Is it possible that man's search for meaning results in the search for meaning itself? Is it possible that simply by trying to understand why one is here one is answering the question? Patterns do not lie. Religions and philosophies orbit humanity, held together with the gravity of a search for meaning. Some claim to find meaning in religion and philosophy, be it in a deity or lack of a deity. Either way, there is faith involved – be it the casual faith of an atheist in a lack of a deity or the more rigorous faith of believing in a deity. The search for meaning is not found in religion or a lack of religion – it is only punctuated by it. In every philosophy and religion, we idolize those that we believe obtained meaning.

Meaning is not found in tradition. Tradition only gives a context, and religion inherits this. Any religious text only prescribes a methodology for finding meaning – or not finding meaning but accepting a certain level of meaning, perhaps to keep one from poking too many holes in one's own mind in the late night.

Where is meaning found? Meaning is only found in the search for meaning. Truth is only found in the shades of perception, sometimes lurking in the blind spot of the mind and heart. There is no truth because there is no false. There are no lies, only blurs of lines. There is no thought, only streams of consciousness filtered through our own perceptions – and our perceptions are fed by the perceptions of others, leading one through a filtered maze looking for something that we cannot define.

Meaning.

Why do we need meaning so? Is it a fear of the unexpected? Is it death itself, the question mark we find at the end of Life? Or is it that we are, generally speaking, innately curious about how we came about and where we will go? Is it something that shook us from the oceans and trees and sent us into space, or transplanted us from some Garden of Eden?

Perhaps the answer is in the question itself. Why do we seek meaning? Perhaps because we crave what we do not understand. We are our own librarians, and yet we are also the books scattered on the floor.

Sooner or later, a pattern emerges. If our meaning is truly in our own search for meaning and we can come to terms with that, will the pattern have evolved?

Will it change anything?