Subject #28: On the meaning of life

One of the most common ”deep” things that people like to ponder is this: what is the meaning of life? It was also one of my favourite questions in the past. What is my purpose here? Why was I born and not someone else? What is the meaning of all this? How to live? In the past I had concluded that meaning of life was to be happy. Then bit over two years ago I was sitting in a kitchen table on remote mountains in Colorado and put it like this:

Question: What is the meaning of life?
Answer: What is the meaning of a flower?

Now, there are two ways to interpret the answer. First way is to observe the flower. What does the flower do? Bloom. Is that the meaning of flower? Ask the flower. Second way is to see the insanity of the whole question. When the question no longer makes sense to you, the answer disappears as well.

People are still very troubled by this search of purpose. That’s why some people dedicate their life to work - feeling useful and needed there. Some people dedicate their life to family – same stuff. If one lives life through something (work, family, anything) then that something is just a substitute for life itself. All purposes are nothing but attempts to fulfill the question.

Here are few quotes regarding the subject:

In this very breath that we take now lies the secret that all great teachers try to tell us.
~Peter Matthiessen

"Be sure to make mistakes. Make a lot of them, because there's no better way to learn and to grow."
~Dawson´s Creek (Jen Lindley)

"Do what you want to do. It is your life. Fill it with your own choices."
~Ishani

"It's not what happens to you, but what you do with whatever happens to you."
~W. Mitchell