One of the attirbutes of a truly well educated person, is that such a person does not lose interest in the mysterious. Life in a world environment such as ours has to be full of surprises. Thus, it is that there is no valid theory of everything. There may be a theory of something, but not everything. There will always be a mystery to solve. That is what continuing education is all about.
When we open ourselves to learning on a continuing basis we open ourselves also to the mysterious. Those that think everything has been discovered cannot be right, they may think that for them, it is time to put up the feet and rest away from a world that is continually evolving. They have only defined what for them seems a best policy. Such people choose to ignore the change going on about them. They also perhaps do not realize that nothing is permanent.
One surity that we all experience is that everything has a life and death process attached to any state that it may have. All frozen ice eventually melts. All solid rock eventually loses its solidity. Changes in everything mean that nothing material is what it seems to be. It takes on the nature of an object when in reality its most defining characteristic is that it is not an object over the longer term.
Our ancestors were possibly closer than we ourselves to an understanding of the changing nature of things. The closer they were to continuous change, the more difficult they found it to create something that lasted. It is our modern faith in the semi-permanence of things that gives us meaning. We see ourselves less a part of a changing environment and more a part of a world in which we can create a niche that is sustainable.
The big question is whether we have the ability to create something that is sustainable and permanent out of all the science and religious effort we spend in thinking we do things that are meaningful. A test of whether we create something lasting is whether or not it remains with us while we are living. We have less control over things when we are dead, but if we have not control over them while we are living, it defies reason that we can find meaning in our efforts.
What gums up the works of one trying to achieve a sort of niche or permanence is the realization at some point that we are all subject to the mysterious world that we know nothing about. Our interest in the mysterious world needs to be sustained if we are to find meaning, for the one thing that will reduce our efforts to change is the participation of the mysterious in the period after we give up our efforts to create something that has lasting value. This is the ironical aspect to our existence is that we have around all the time a world of mysteries, a world that is infinitely greater than we can ever imagine, that will ultimately reduce all our efforts to something we would never recognize.
If we were to live long into the future, our biggest problem would be that we could not keep up with the rate of change around us. The mystery that surrounds us all the time is the very vastness of the world we inhabit. It is so vast that it is almost incomprehensible that we could ever exist at all, and when we do realise that we do exist, we may or may not also realize just how small a part we play in the vastness of the world we were born to. It's almost as if we were never born.
But that is the whole point isn't it. If we assume that we are what we see that we are, we make a huge mistake. We are nothing like what we see that we are. We are and must be much greater and significant. It's as if the whole world was made for us. During our stay in the world it is up to us to take note of who and what we are in what we think of as the present, to remember ourselves and to realize that we are not what we think we are. No way are we ever even close to what we think we are!