What is life?
Life is a journey that starts with your birth and ends with your death. Within this journey, you experience your own existence in an unknown world. This is the reason you are born with the ability to learn, with a strong sense of curiosity and a passion to discover more and more about your world. You are the center of this world and the more you know about it the more you enrich your experience.
The most important mission of your life is to stay alive so your period of experience in this world extends longer and longer and what comes naturally is that you just love every moment of it and appreciate this amazing experience.
Your experience gives you a variety of sensations that you receive through your five senses. You feel pain, you feel pleasure, you feel love, you feel a connection, you feel fear, you feel envy, you feel joy and the list goes on and on. As you grow, your mind grows and this gives you the ability to expand the level of your experience and even go beyond what is surrounding you at the moment. You can think of the past and enjoy or suffer from the memories of it, your imagination can help you to think about the possible future and what you wish it to be. You learn to see things that don’t exist now but existed in the past or might exist in the future. And by this capacity, you improve the level of your experience and enhance your life further.
Life and death
We naturally fear death. This fear of death prompts us to take action and do something for our survival.
But death is the best thing about life. It puts a cap on the time we have. It reminds us that we need to value our time as the most precious thing we have and to use it only for the most important things. Death also teaches us that there is an end to everything both good and bad, both pain and pleasure.
While fear of death is natural and has been the best alarm to keep us alive, obsessing and worrying about death is not natural and it is a creation of our mind. Now we don’t fear dying at just this moment so we should do something about it to avoid the actual danger in front of us, but we are afraid of dying eventually. This fear is not helpful but harmful. We are afraid of what is inevitable.
Natural fear is when we fear something that we don’t know if it’s happening or not. That uncertainty about the risk makes us do something about it and avoid the risk from happening. We might fight or flight (escape).
But we are naturally not afraid of the inevitable. We embrace it. So we created a new type of fear, and now we have learned wrongly to fear something such as death as if by fearing we may become immortal.
Love:
“Would you become a pilgrim on the road of love? The first condition is that you make yourself humble as dust and ashes.” (Rumi)
Love is the most amazing and best gift of life. As humans, we have the capacity to love and crave to be loved. This capacity connects us to each other and even to other things. With love, we can go as deep as we want and still there is more to go.
When we proactively love, we make it an art. We learn how to connect and give and receive and bring warmth to our hearts and to our lives. With love, everything we experience gets much more interesting.
The purpose of life:
We have developed a culture to seek purpose for life. We wrongly seek reasons to live; some of us go out of our ways to find what our life is about. While we seek to find a complicated and strange meaning for life, we forget to look at it differently and see that the answer is as simple as this; the purpose of life is to live it, to be, to exist, and to experience it, to appreciate everything about it and to thrive in it.
Yes, life is a journey and it’s our journey and despite that, we didn’t choose to begin it and we don’t have a choice but to end it one day, as long as we are alive, we have the choice to live it so we should live it.
Giving and taking:
As living things, we are both destined to take and give. We don’t have a choice in this but to do both. All living things do so. This taking and giving make us part of the eco-system that we live in. For example, we eat food but we are a great source of food for other creatures and eventually, we will be completely consumed by other creatures. But as human beings, we have developed a culture to take and give beyond what other living things do.
We are part of the human family and from the time that we are born, we receive things such as protection, food, education, love and intimacy and so many other things from our family, friends, and the rest of the society. As we receive, there is an obligation to give. By giving we complete this cycle and we appear more natural, we enjoy our being among others and we feel there is a meaning to our life.
Listening to our inner voice:
“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking.” – Steve Jobs
Some of us are lucky enough to find our passion meets our talents and we find that what we give can be focused on a specific area and it takes shape as a mission of life. We are not happy just for small giving here and there but we want to change the world or at least our community and make it better.
Happiness:
In the journey of life, we often ask ourselves whether we are happy or not. We compare ourselves with others and wonder how we can find more happiness. We wonder as if happiness is lost somewhere and our mission in life is to find it.
But happiness is and has always been with us. Instead of pursuing happiness, what we need to learn is to experience happiness just where we are and with all that we have. There is no human being on earth that doesn’t have enough to be happy with regardless of their situation. What makes us unhappy is not our situation but rather our interpretation of the situation.
Yes, we think of what we don’t have that we should have had. We think of what we don’t have that we had before and we think of what we don’t have that others do. These negative thoughts are the enemy of our happiness.
Pain and pleasure don’t make us happy nor do they make us unhappy unless our minds interpret them and give meaning to them. This is why we enjoy the pain of exercise while we feel bad about eating a delicious cake. The first one is a pain but our minds interpret it as a sign of progress toward a better future and the second is interpreted as getting fat and ugly.
So, in order to be happier, it is useless to seek it from the outside. We need to learn to appreciate what we have, who we are and improve our ability to use the external resources whatever it has to live better.
Success:
Does success bring happiness? This is one of the questions that keeps coming and being answered by anyone who thinks about human happiness. There is no absolute yes or no answer to this question and this is why it keeps coming without satisfying the seekers of a yes or no answer.
Success makes you happy only if you allow it to do so. If we succeed in whatever we hoped to achieve, we naturally should feel better.
True success should increase our resources and resources can be used by us to feel happier and fulfilled. If we successfully get a job that pays more, we can use the money to buy things we didn’t have before and a sense of progress in any aspect of our lives makes of happier.
The present:
“Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance, you must keep moving.” — Albert Einstein
In a sense present doesn’t exist since just a few moments ago is past and by the time we notice we are in the immediate future.
Today is not going to be today forever. It is becoming yesterday. Appreciating what we have now and experiencing it with attention and enthusiasm increases our chance to have even a better day tomorrow.
The past:
“Turn your wounds into wisdom.” — Oprah Winfrey
Some say that the past is the past and you should forget all about it. Some also say that the more you look into your past the slower you become in your journey toward a better future.
While there is some wisdom in this way of thinking about the past, it is also important to know that past is all the things that made us who we are today. Past could be painful and looking into it may cause more pain but the past is also a great wealth of experience. Also no matter how difficult our past could be, still there are chances to find moments of happiness and joy that we want to revisit and bring joy into our present.
The future:
“My mama always said, life is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re gonna get.” — Forrest Gump
Our present life is more beautiful when we know there is also a future. Future is where we haven’t visited yet but we are looking forward to it. If our present is pleasant and we like it we want our future to be at least like a present or even better. And if our present is difficult and painful, we can hope and work for a future free of them.