I loved This I Believe as a teenager, and I love it now as a retiree. Man and boy, I’ve loved it for the same reason: the series suggests different ways you or I or any of us can look at life. I find myself half persuaded, momentarily persuaded, by almost everything everyone believes.
I think what I love is hearing people do well what it is our unique—so far as we know—human gift to do: make spoken sense of the world. This is what I believe: we are meaning-making creatures, and the world, whatever it is in itself, for an instant becomes what we, with our need for meaning, make it. This is, I see now, a paraphrase what the poet Wallace Stevens wrote in many poems, most obviously "The Idea of Order at Key West." Stevens took the idea from Pragmatists like William James, who adapted it from Romantic philosophers like Kant and Emerson, who were influenced by Nominalists like William of Ockham and Buddha.
Which is fine! Great! What I believe has a pedigree.
If we humans make meaning, does this mean there is no God determining What’s Really True? Who knows? We can’t know. All I know is that, as far as I know, here on earth we are the meaning makers, and the strongest meaning makers among us—people like Plato, Aristotle, Ecclesiastes, Jesus, Mohammed, Dante, Torquemada, Shakespeare, or closer to today, Marx, Darwin, Dickinson, Whitman, Freud, Einstein, Kafka, Hemingway, Hitler, Roosevelt, B.F. Skinner (the initials stand for “Bloody Fool,” detractors said)—create the worlds in which millions of us, across time, have lived, however long or briefly.
But it’s not only to past people that we look for meaning. We are always on the lookout for help in understanding life. We look for help in the movies and TIME cover stories and pop music and TV ads and the comments of Jay Leno. Walter Cronkite said “And that’s the way it is” when he closed his news show every night, and for a split second we believed him.
The Spanish say “sobre gustos, no hay nada escrito”: on matters of taste, there is nothing written. In fact, I think that’s the way life is: because there can never be enough written to explain what we experience, it’s as though nothing is written, and the world is still, and always, waiting for us, each of us, to interpret and resee it, express our vision of it and try to persuade others to share our vision.
I believe this is the greatest and most exciting challenge we face: to find the courage to tell the truth about the world as we, each of us, see it. But with this challenge comes a warning: not to believe in our truth so much that we try to compel others to accept it. We can exuberantly proselytize for our truth—as every This I Believe speaker does, as I’ve done here—but our listeners must always feel free to turn us off.
