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In an ancient episode of the Andy Griffith Show (which is where, I’m afraid, most of my conceptions about things like right and wrong and purpose and meaning find their root), Opie and Andy are sitting on the front porch.

It is a typical day in Mayberry. Neither father nor son appears anxious to be anyplace else or to engage in anything more complicated than each other’s company.

“Pa?” Opie finally offers, after a pause long enough to get someone in today’s entertainment industry fired.

“Yes, Ope?”

Another long pause.

“You know what I’ve figured out about women?” (My own children have changed the channel by this time.) Andy’s head cocks almost imperceptibly.

“No, Opie. What have you figured out about women?”

Opie shrugs, and with a note of exasperation, says:

“Nothing.”

This exchange came to mind recently when Rolfe McCollister Jr. invited me to pen a brief essay on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of Business Report, of which I was fortunate to serve as editor for the better part of its first decade.

My idea was to memorialize the store of wisdom I have acquired in the last quarter of a century and then share it freely with the worthy people of Baton Rouge as a boon and dispensation for all the good things that happened to me in your wonderful city for the nearly 14 years I was a resident.

That was the idea.

After several days meditating on this theme, I came to the sad and sudden realization that the older I get, the less I know. And by “know,” I don’t mean possessing a superior command of facts or statistics. I’m not talking about comprehending winning strategies for getting ahead at the office and in life. I don’t mean seven habits or 12 steps that will change your world forever if you only promise to believe.

I’m talking life lessons here, the eternal verities. I mean, what are the irreducibles? What are the things of which you are so certain that you feel the rightness of them in your body? It’s not a matter of figuring out what you’re willing to die for, but just the opposite: What’s worth living for? What is important and true enough to deserve the chunk of your life that you devote to it? Of what is life’s bedrock made?

And then I had my Opie moment.

It was a feeling identical to what I experienced the first time I saw the Milky Way … a feeling approaching nothingness.

What, precisely, have I figured out about anything?

My wife, Amy, and our children have taken to camping as our principal summer vacation activity. In Oregon, where we have lived for as long as I lived in Baton Rouge, camping—even at the height of summer—means wearing sweaters (but not insect repellent).

I discovered during one of our early camping trips at Trillium Lake on the south face of awesome Mount Hood that I actually had figured something out: The sky goes on forever.

Sounds trite, doesn’t it? Truth to tell, in all my many years in Louisiana and then Washington, D.C., my own two eyes always told me the sky ended where the light from countless mercury vapor lamps finally gave up fighting the particles suspended in the air and hung there, defeated. Through the strange pink pall looming densely overhead, I could only conclude that a significant percentage of the matter in the known universe is part of either Orion or the Big Dipper.

But then it happened.

There comes a moment when you are with the people you love most in the world and the moon is full and Mount Hood is casting a perfect reflection onto Trillium Lake, and you are lying on your back on a wooden pier still warm from the sun that only went down an hour ago (at 10 o’clock by the way) and you look up and see the Milky Way—really and truly for the first time.

In a breathtaking instant, hundreds of thousands of stars you knew existed but had never directly experienced suddenly leap forever into your consciousness. You feel drawn upward off the deck, weirdly free from the bonds of gravity, and become part of the great vastness in front of you.

In that dizzying moment, you know you are literally the stuff of stars. The flame that fires those impossibly distant furnaces flickers in every cell of your body. This is not the stuff of poetry and romance, but of physical truth and direct experience. Wow.

Well, what could this possibly have to do with Opie and with Business Report’s anniversary and with figuring out what it is I’ve been able to figure out, if anything?

Only this:

I wish I were as certain about things now as I was when the first issue of Business Report was published. I wish I could tell you that if you believed certain things and behaved certain ways, you would succeed at life.

I don’t want to be 26 again, but wouldn’t it be wonderful to experience certainty the way I once did, even if just for a day? How exhilarating it would be to expound a list of certitudes and be able to act on them—even expect others to act on them, too, just for their sheer brilliance and resistance to argument.

Such has not been my lot, I’m afraid. Instead, I’m with Opie—only gray at the temples and at a point in life where I fear regret more than death.

If I have figured out anything, it is this: You have to figure it out for yourself. You won’t find the answer in a book or at the feet of a guru or on a three-DVD collection. You have to listen to the universe, and once you do figure something out, give it all you’ve got.

But this is supposed to be a happy occasion. Congratulations, Rolfe. Your publication is better than it has ever been, and I am thrilled to see it so vibrant and relevant in its 25th year.

Let me spend the remaining space expressing my deep and sincere gratitude to Rolfe McCollister Sr., who believed in me enough to give me my real start in life. He is missed, and I fear our culture is not making many more of his kind.

And, of course, I want to thank Rolfe Jr. for providing me the opportunity to believe in something and to give it all I had.