I was precisely ten years old when I started pondering the meaning of life. The very thought of it made me wonder what we were all doing here on earth. What good is living anyway if someday you would eventually die? Why is living so synonymous with dying? How does one reconcile this paradox of life? How can I possibly live a life that I will eventually have to give up lose? The whole idea of life was just too complex for anyone to understand.
It seemed like one big web in which all of us were trapped and endlessly struggling to escape. The painful part is that sometimes we end up being strangled by the web holding us down. Life seemed like an endless journey too broad for anyone to cover within the allotted time. It appears in the end that we always run out of time. Since there is so much to be done, we are caught up in the struggle of life, consistently trying to do all we can within the given space of time.
Then what is the joy of being here if we are not allowed enough time to do all we want? In my opinion, I could see a beginning and an end; the time of our birth, when we were born, and the time of our death, when we die. What I didn’t quite understand were the moments in between, the moments between our birth and our death-the moments of life. Deep down within me, I knew there was something more profound. There had to be some explanation, a reason for life, one other than just living and dying-a reason other than mere existence. So I committed to understanding the real meaning of life, my lifetime goal.
Once you have life, sooner or later, you will discover the painful truth about life. The challenge was this; what more is there to live other than just living and dying existence? I wasn’t the only one with this challenge as I grew. Many others like me were equally battling with this paradox of life-existence, merely living and dying. It was now evident life truly is complex. It is involved in the sense that it requires a lot of things from us.
The problem I discovered with many over the years while studying and pondering this subject is not whether they want to survive but instead whether they desire more from life than mere survival. Which is; that having a life means existence-being alive and active requires survival-staying active. This need for survival has been genetically encoded into our very being. It’s a natural inclination to want to survive-stay alive. And staying alive (survival), as we’ve come to know, is hard work!
