Seeker

There’s something beautifully absurd about the human compulsion to seek. Not to find, mind you. Finding is an awkward dance, often disappointing, like hugging a stranger who smells like your dad. No, the juice is in the seeking, the mad scramble for meaning in the eternal scavenger hunt of existence.

What makes a seeker human? It’s not the tools—chimps use sticks, octopuses open jars. It’s not even the questions—a dog might wonder where the ball went, though it’s more of a simple calculus than a cosmic quandary. What’s uniquely human is the infuriating refusal to accept the answers, even when they’re right in front of us. We’ll take a neatly wrapped truth, shake it like a Christmas present, then chuck it in the fireplace just to see what burns.

A seeker wakes up with a belly full of why. Why this life? Why these people? Why does coffee sometimes taste like salvation and other times like regret? The answers don’t matter—not really. They’re like road signs on the highway; they tell you where you’re going, but they’re not the journey.

What’s deeply, deliciously human is the itch for more. We build telescopes to peer into the edge of the universe, as if staring at a cosmic void will explain why your neighbor still hasn’t mowed their lawn. We write poems that don’t rhyme, chase careers that don’t pay, fall in love with people who don’t love us back. We seek because standing still feels like death, even though death is the one destination we’re all guaranteed to reach.

And maybe this is why I have such a general distaste for academia and academics. Their pursuits are conducted in such sterile, preordained arenas that they never seem to savor the true thrill of the chase. They’re like marathon runners on treadmills, sweating and straining but never really going anywhere. The seeker in me balks at their tidy calculations and predictable conclusions, so often missing the messy, chaotic point entirely. Academia wraps its findings in rigid formulas and peer-reviewed boxes, as if the universe could ever be tamed by footnotes and formatting guidelines.

The seeker’s journey is a paradox. To seek is to admit you don’t know, and yet to seek also requires the audacity to believe you can find out. It’s a tightrope walk between humility and hubris, and we’re all one existential sneeze away from falling into the abyss.

The abyss isn’t scary. It’s where the magic happens. The abyss is where art lives, where dreams take their first wobbly steps, where the seeker learns that the real prize isn’t what you find, but how you looked.

So here’s to the seekers. To those who climb mountains not to conquer them, but to feel small against the sky. To those who ask questions they know can’t be answered, and to those who answer questions no one asked. Here’s to the fools with starry eyes and blistered feet, who wander through the chaos with open hearts and clenched fists, daring the universe to make sense.

Stay curious, stay restless, stay wonderfully, impossibly human. Seek on.

-sedale