"What has been is remote and exceedingly mysterious," opines the writer of Ecclesiastes in, again, chapter seven of his meditations, "who can understand it?"  These words were of course penned many millenniums before we of the twenty-first century grew accustomed to various historians unearthing the smallest detail of the past lives of our fellow human beings.  Is what has been really exceedingly mysterious when historians today can reproduce nearly every aspect of what has happened in the past?
     On the other hand, even though we today would like to think that with sufficient method and time we can come to understand almost every dimension of humanity's past, we will not.  Try as we might, we cannot use physical and objective evidence, alone, to discern, fully, what people were really thinking and feeling hundreds of years ago.  Like our own memories that with each passing year fade ever more from our immediate purview, so will the individuated emotions, longings, and spiritual experiences which have run through our ancestors' lives and hearts ebb steadily away from us.  Though we can come very close and, in some instances, become very precise, in the broad picture, we will not succeed fully.
     We humans are only one species that is living on the planet, one species whose immediate ken is restricted to what we can hear, taste, touch, and see.  What we decide is meaningful, and what we decide anything means is the fruit of a finite being.  We can't fully know what the past really means or, for that matter, the present as well.  We walk in shadows.
     Continue to seek understanding of reality; continue to endeavor to unpack ultimate meaning; yet know as well that, as the writer insists, you will never know it all.  Outside of a larger presence of purpose, that is, a personal and living God, you will never know, fully, the answer to the biggest question of all:  why are you or anything else here?
     It's "exceedingly mysterious."