If you took the bait and want to learn the meaning of life now, you will not be disappointed! You won’t even have to skim through much verbage, even though I may now have you in a self-captive state of curiosity. Brace yourself, because you are about to receive the keys to the kingdom.
THE MEANING OF LIFE IS THE ABILITY TO ASK THE QUESTION.
When I told this to an intelligent woman who posts her own blogs, I asked her if, maybe, I should rephrase the statement to something akin to “Once you’ve asked what the meaning of life is, you have already answered your own question.” and she told me that being so explicit might detract from a certain component of minimalist brevity present by using fewer words and still getting the idea across.. In other words, she felt my original statement was more “elegant” (my choice of words). So I listened to her sage critique. Thank You, Strunk and White (authors of “The Elements of Style”) and many,many thanks to Chaya N.
Think about it. Once you have questioned what life is all about, asking what the very “essence” of life is, you have unwittingly allowed life to fufill the very engine of its own architecture. It doesn’t matter if maybe you got some kind of a mystical answer back from some stealthy intelligent force, sequestered away in some intangible dimension of the Universe, who mercifully heard the timbre of angst in your voice, or if you only heard the last syllable of your desperate question drain off into a vast emptiness, you have just answered your question via having posed it. Life had just come full circle in front of you when you ponder why life itself even exists.
Now, perhaps you may think to yourself that I am merely echoing Descartes’ iconic statement “I think, therefore I am!” Not really. That satement is an answer to a question about reality, and whether our very existence is only an illusory experience, or if there is truly an objective reality out there which would still exist even if we weren’t here to observe and affect its existence (my apologies to Heisenberg for stealing your thunder). I am saying that the meaning of life was fufillled and life, itself, was in its grandeur at the very point when a living intelligence was asking a question as to whether or not some kind independent reality actually exists. Regardless if there is any kind of answer we are capable of grasping or not, whatever LIFE is had just displayed itself in abundance.
So then it follows that you, yourself, are the answer to everything. People will sometimes spend their very lives praying to God for a miracle, while concurrently being oblivious to the fact that the miracle has already happened because they have made it here in the first place. Maybe God would be more pleased to hear “Thank You” rather than “I want more”.
My next post will tell you how to be happy in this miraculous life of yours.
-PoorGina
A Life Less Narrow 