…is long and painful. Most of us have been raised on values and beliefs, consciously or not, that compel us to act in accordance with tenets of morality and purpose. But what happens when we lose our faith? What happens when those values no longer mean anything? What can we fall back on to satisfy the basic human need for optimism and a sense of purpose? For the religiously inclined, I suppose this is not a particular problem as God is the epoxy resin filling any moral gaps. Yet all of us at one time or another are faced with moments of doubt, moments where what we once thought was unquestionable succumbs to contrary evidence, or at least experiences a severe jarring either from external occurrences or internal realizations - the proverbial epiphany. The result is a sort of mental paradigm shift and the consequences can range from euphoric elation to existential depression.

The same process seems to occur when we attempt to make sense of the things we experience or witness. Our need to understand and control our surroundings encourages us to build a system of beliefs, often as simple as a set of clichés, to rationalize things that would otherwise have no sense of meaning.

Here are some such ideas off the top of my head:

- people are generally good

- things always happen for a reason (and many variations)

- there is always a silver lining; April showers…

- people are self-interested and rational

There are more practical ones too:

- judges don’t make the law

- politicians usually act for the greater good

- hotdogs really are meat

You get the idea. There are fundamental assumptions on which we base our perceptions and actions that, for the most part, we rarely question. When things don’t fit into a neat little box they are either ignored or explained away as rare exception. Occasionally though we are hit over the head with facts we cannot ignore and we are forced to recognize the exposed nerve that is left of our assumptions.

Personally, I have been going though a relatively long period of my life where my fundamental assumptions are being eroded little by little, but just fast enough so that I don’t have time to rebuild. Call it a mid-mid-life crisis. Partly this has been a conscious effort on my part, a Cartesian quest to call all things in to question. Undoubtedly, this is also an effect of 9 weeks of law school and the constant Socratic bombardment of my intellectual foundations; a perpetual “why?”. All of this, combined with a series of externalities (as the economists say) has left a yawning rift where I once felt there was certainty - or at least predictability.

(As further illustration: how the hell do you explain that the Red Sox are going to win the World Series?)

As much as I would like to conclude with some profound closing statement, I have none, but I’d be interested in any opinions, especially about hotdogs and the Red Sox.