Remember “Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy?”

Which told us that the answer to the meaning of life is: “42”?

42? How ridiculous. How incomplete. How could that ever be the answer to something so vast and incomprehensible?! It’s as vague an answer as most religions or your parents will give you when you’re little – with their “well’s” and “ya know’s” and mumbling soft-languaged replies. Which made Neil DeGrasse’s recent answer to a kid’s same question far more gratifying: find your own meaning by learning and sharing what you’ve learned every day:

Occasionally these little Q & A talks will pop up in the shitchyushouldclickon section on this rectangular light box I call my work station. And while the likes of “See Miley’s full frontal!” always appeal to at least some section of my base ape desires (I’ll probably look after I’m done with this – and write about it), Neil and his insights tend to take precedence. Because, having seen snippets from these appearances he’s done before and watching him reply to big questions from little people (like the kid who posed a solution for stopping earthbound asteroids), he’s proven to be nothing short of a Cosmos messiah. He’s the giant teddy bear nobody’s ever won for me at the fair, Jesus, and a that one professor I had in sophomore year of college who made the building blocks of life so entrancing that I changed majors from liberal arts to biology the day I met her. People like Neil aren’t common. And that’s because they don’t say common things. Or complex things. In fact, what he does do is take complex subjects and simplify the reply in an entertaining way:

Meaning of life is what you make it.

And you make it by learning. And you learn from nature.

Might be a more boring message if he didn’t seem interested in what he was sharing enough to crouch down and get personal and act silly, wouldn’t it? That’s why I disagree with him only on the school point. I can totally see why kids celebrate its end in summer. It’s not because of learning. We like to learn and we just don’t know it. That’s because the setting (classrooms) aren’t conducive to quality learning or lesson retention. They’re boring, that’s where we learn, thus we think all learning’s boring. I remember school. It was little more than sitting around and passively having someone’s words slung at you like you’re on a collapsible bench in a dunk tank. Sure enough, after enough monotony pinged at you, one hits and you fall – in this case – asleep. As a result, concepts like learning and thinking immediately get equated to this prison without yard time and with the same food. It turns the best and brightest of us in cheating, miserable, social climbing zombies.

So, can you blame ’em?

The trick is to reclaim words like those that have become just as tainted as god or love or taint (c’mon – what do you really think of when you hear “taint”? ‘taint any dictionary definition outside of Urban’s.) Or even that other word he says is a good source for learning: nature. (“So I’mma take my steno pads with a bunch of hippies outside and wait for the trees to talk? Seriously? Where my phone at?”) Sure, venturing into the forest alone around golden hour can give you a decently tweaked outlook. But “natural” lessons includes all the other stuff you come across naturally and being aware enough to mentally bookmark it: jumping in puddles and banging pots and pans, like he says. Or your daily interactions with people – that you can learn from them and share what you know too. And that, in the end, is both the barometer and what brings it full circle: you learn from nature and the people in it, use it to help other people in it (whether it’s that “I have a solution” thing he mentions or “I have an experience to share that might help”), then rinse and repeat. What’s life’s meaning? More like – what’s life’s meaning today? Learn everything you can and then you tell me. Maybe your answer will seem different from mine – but it’s not really in the end. Just like Neil’s isn’t so different from robot Helen’s:

“42”. Per the alphabet (something we all learned), “4th” is “D”. “2nd” is “B”.

Devour Books.

Dispatch Benefit.

Defy Banality.

Do Better.

DeGrasse = Badass

As he says, you find your own meaning – if you’re willing to look.