Personal Housekeeping

I start work at Yahoo doing web development August 21st. No other job has left me as excited by what it could be, and as unsure of what it will be.

Emily had her eleventh birthday at the end of July. While I was there she asked me if I believed we go to Heaven when we die. She said she doesn’t believe in Hell and she’s not sure about Heaven or God. I was quietly beaming inside. I was so proud. She was grappling with faith and reason and finding a role for those ideas in her life. I think I gave her a frustrating answer when I said what I know is that we don’t know what happens next.

Someday I’ll nudge her towards Ursula K. Le Guin’s novel “The Left Hand of Darkness” with that great section between Faxe and Genry:

The unknown, the unforetold, the unproven, that is what life is based on. Ignorance is the ground of thought. Unproof is the ground of action. If it were proven that there were no God there would be no religion … But also if it were proven that there is a God, there would be no religion … Tell me, Genry, what is known? What is sure, predictable, inevitable – the one certain thing you know concerning your future, and mine?That we shall die.Yes. There’s really only one question that can be answered, Genry, and we already know the answer … The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next.