Life

Life

We, sons of the water, earth and sun, are no more than small straw, foetus of the cosmic diaspora, scraps of solar existence, and insignificant sprouts of the earth's existence. We are survival machines - robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes. This is a truth which still fills me with astonishment.

For years, there has been a question that has always kept me in a 'pause states'. Is human life just a dream, from which we never really awake, as some great thinkers claim? Are we submerged by our feelings, by our loves and hates, by our ideas of good, bad, beautiful, and awful? Are we incapable of knowing beyond those ideas and feelings? Actually what is human life?

Well, according to the scientists, "Life is a state that distinguishes organisms from non-living objects, such as non-life, and dead organisms, being manifested by growth through metabolism and reproduction. Some living things can communicate and many can adapt to their environment through changes originating internally. A physical characteristic of life is that it feeds on negative entropy. In more detail, life is a member of the class of phenomena which are open or continuous systems able to decrease their internal entropy at the expense of substances or free energy taken in from the environment and subsequently rejected in a degraded form."

But what is human life? What is the purpose of life? Why is there something rather than nothing? Why?

Is the reality we know a reality imposed to us by nature? Is the reality and the meaning of life a creation of men, such as music, or love or colors (science tells us that there isn't such things as music, harmony or colors in the physic world. Just traveling molecules: There is not, external to us, hot or cold, but only different velocities of molecules; there aren't sounds, callings, harmonies, but just variations in the pressure of the air; there aren't colours, or light, just electro-magnetic waves.

Are we - and all living beings - just survival machines, blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes? Are we incapable of knowing beyond the frames imposed to us by nature?

Is there any significance for life in a Universe of billions of stars that ignore us? Is there any significance for life in a Universe whose dimensions and nature overcome our understanding?
And years after asking these questions to me, I have found the answers. And it really was wonderful in believing me, in getting to be me for the first time. In between these pendulums - the positive, the one that gives happiness and meaning, and the negative - that our lives are lived. And when we meditate about all that, we arrive at a diverse and disagreeing set of thoughts about the meaning and purpose of life.

Well we do not know. We will never know. Why? To what purpose? We do not know whether there is a purpose. But if it is true that nothing is born of nothing, the very existence of something - the world, the universe - would seem to imply that there has always been something: that being is eternal, uncreated, perhaps creator, and this is what some people call God. I believe that the purpose of life is to be happy.

Life is just. It's just not about one thing; it also includes love, friendship...

Love gives meaning to our lives - as do friendship, or art or faith in God. These are factors of true happiness, of inner peace, of feelings of harmony, allowing meaning to our existence. At our mother breast, we tasted not only milk but also love - just enough love to know that it was the only thing that could ever satisfy us and that we will miss it forever.
To most of the authors, man lives in a world of myths, of fantasies, far way from reality. This is a way of getting existential comfort, and is a biased form of giving meaning to man's lives.

Sigmund Freud said we should thank the illusions. And accept them without complaining. If eventually they collide with reality and break into pieces, they are, after all, a way of giving meaning to life.

We also can't avoid thinking of our existential condition, of the shortness of our lives, of the transitory nature of everything. We do it all the time we exist, in all societies. The brevity of life torments the human spirit. The proximity of death is a source of grief during all our life.

So Let us meditate on the superior way with which someone expressed our condition as human beings: Insignificant mortals, who are as leaves are, and now flourish and grow warm with life, and feed on what the ground gives, but soon fade away and are dead. Let us list the sad music springing out of the words of Marcus Aurelius, the roman emperor, who was also a philosopher, reflecting on the shortness of our lives: Life is a campaign, a brief stay in a strange region. Time is a violent torrent; no sooner is a thing brought to sight than it is swept by, and another takes its place, before this too will be swept away.

There may be trouble ahead,
But while there's moonlight and music and love and romance,
let's face the music and dance.