Is This IT?

Is this life? dreary, empty, and full of mundane, recurring problems? At the end of it all; is this 'the' reality? You are forever struggling, trying, thinking, and endeavoring to make things easier for yourself and life being what it is will resist, will come up with new travails, new issues for you to encounter and overcome. And finally a day comes when your body just gives up and dies and you are no more.

It is only when we believe in an existence after death does this weary life seems bearable, it is merely by attributing a doubtful continuation of our soul or self after the death of this body that we feel reassured and comfortable about what life gives us in the here and now. So, ironically, it is the cessation of being in this world that gives this being any meaning. Isn't that strange?

We are all in anticipation, forever, in this life. Always, waiting. This life is lived in pause, in time beside time itself. We are continuously looking ahead to some undefined time and place in future where we will be able to live the life that we aspire to. But soon enough our whole sojourn here is spent, looking at some unknown future in the distant then, and our bodies revolt, they die on us and who knows 'we', the I in all of us also dies never to be born again in this shape or any other. If this is the truth, then what? Then what is this life other than a complete waste of time and energy and a futile attempt to being something bigger than our puny selves. An ambition which always gets defeated, declined and discontinued despite all our efforts. The more immortal we try to be, with our actions, our thoughts, our role as this or that, the more mortal we tend to seem, the shorter our lives seem to be, and the impossibility of surpassing the limitations imposed by time and place on us becomes all the more evident, all the more in relief and prominent.

Our Lives then are what? How, and should we, must give them meaning? I don't know. What is this eternal and essential quest with finding and attributing 'meaning' to all we do and are. Why can't we be satisfied and content with the way things are, that we are born, live for a certain period of time, have many experiences both good and bad, love and hate and eventually die and cease to be. Why? this fascination with wanting to give meaning to everything we do or are? Why are we born? What are we? What happens when we die? why so many questions and why each one of us at one time or another face some of these things? And ponder over the reality of being and its purpose if there is any at all?

Is it that Lives don't have purpose. It is the individual lives that give purpose to it, is it you and me who attribute a certain meaning to our lives on our own terms and that is the only end and meaning of life; living that self-defined purpose? And any one purpose is good as another, for who is to judge?