What questions do you ask yourself?
Do you have any questions that you have tried to answer for most of your life?
I have always tried to find the answer to the question,“What is everything?”

It is hard to maintain focus on that question, though. It is easy to get diverted to other, smaller questions, such as, what is the nature of a rock? Or of a star? Or a starfish? These smaller questions often yield much more interesting, abundant, and more practical results. They are attractive. They so easily attract attention away from a larger, more frustrating question such as, “What is everything?” But that is the question I try to answer.

As I began taking philosophy classes in school I stumbled onto the early Ionian philosophers - usually identified as “the Pre-Socratic” philosophers for their location on the timeline. I had to stumble onto them because beginning philosophy classes usually do not begin at the beginning of philosophy. They start elsewhere, and find their ways around after entering somewhere in the middle. By the time I stumbled onto the Ionians I had already read from and struggled with the works of many other philosophers before finding Thales’ (the first of the Ionians) single pronouncement: “All is water.”

All is water.
That sounds kooky, of course.

I had to read the commentaries, which credit Thales with giving the first, non-animated observation of how the world works. (An animated explanation would be something like saying, as the explanation for the sun’s rising and setting, that someone drives a chariot carrying the sun across the sky every day. In Thales’ day, that was the common explanation.)
Thales proposed a single, non-animated principle that could explain all observable phenomena, that could account for all our experiences in the world: the three states of water. In our ordinary experience of water it is a liquid. When very cold it becomes a solid, when very hot a gas. The three states of mater, summed up, illustrated, epitomized in: water. The one principle that explains (to some degree, anyway) everything. Brilliant!
His explanation covers a great deal of our experience with the world. Matter generally does sort itself out into one of those three states. However, most of us do not feel satisfied with an explanation of everything that addresses only the three states of matter. (To be fair, Thales might not have intended to assume the burden of explaining everything.)

Ultimately, Thales failed. Over the centuries since his time we have been failing valiantly as well, looking to find the one explanation for all. That is the history of philosophy.
That is our history. We fail repeatedly, but never give up. This, then, is my effort at a valiant failure, my attempt to explain:

What is everything?
What is good?
And how should we live?

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