[Nogrod]

Actually I think my thought will combine with Boro's (and yours Legate) quite neatly. And thank's Boro for adding something I had totally ignored as I thought of the question just from this human perspective we people tend to have...

So this ME is a place of transient things, ever-recurring conditions and choices, forwards and backwards... always incomplete. From an immortal perspective it should be frustrating indeed.

That's why those elves dwelling in the West had no such problems, living in the platonic world of perfectness as they were. And because of that gap between men and the elves we men can never really understand the bliss of an ever-unchanging world the elves might long for - and therefore the only meaning given to us humans is, like Gandalf says "deciding what to do with the time that is given to us".