What is the Purpose of Life?
We are born. We enter this world with an empty canvas and the tools to decorate and create a final piece of artwork that portrays our journey along the way – whether it be a masterpiece filled with emotion of bliss and passion or a mediocre creation filled with misery and regret or whether we compare to the likes of Michelangelo or an unknown street artist, is truly in no one else’s but our own hands.
What is life? Defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as: the condition that distinguishes animals and plants from inorganic matter including the capacity for growth, reproduction, functional activity, and continual change preceding death. But I would like to think of life as something deeper than that, after all it is the greatest gift that we receive. Are we simply just born to die or is there more to it than that? We are all given a commensurate chance to leave our humanitarian imprint on this raw planet – although that chance may come easier to certain people than others based on social hierarchy and genetic legacies, the fact is we take what we are given and either use every single microscopic molecule of it to its entire ability or fail to grasp it whilst it is still in our reach.
The journey. I lie in bed at night consumed by the silence of darkness that captivates my insignificant bedroom- yes my bedroom, one of billions of bedrooms found on this insignificant planet – one of what I believe to be billions of other planets. As I reminisce over daily events I try to decide what exactly life is and what exactly I plan on making of mine. Naturally as a teenager I often ignorantly define ‘end of the world’ events as having a bad hair day or experiencing minor problems within my petty social circle, but truthfully I am fully aware of the fact that in the ‘real’ world these things have no significance at all: they are nothing. A mere sixteen years into my life I am beginning to realize that perhaps we should not focus on our final destination but rather enjoy and live the journey along the way, for it is the journey where the memories are created.
We die. To even begin to unconditionally live our lives we need to accept death. No one knows what death is or what happens to us when we die or where it is that we go, but what we do know is that death gives us the chance to leave behind our legacy- what precisely that legacy is, is defined by the way we live our lives. When I die I plan on not only leaving behind a single now occupied canvas but rather an entire gallery of artwork portraying my fully lived life.
The purpose of life is to live it.
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