What is the meaning of life? People have been asking that question and searching for the answer in many different ways for eons. Before the creation of civilizations with societal rules, one of our ancestors discovered that they could use a rock as a tool… the birth of the stone-age… life got a little easier. Then someone got tired of just eating veggies so they added meat to the diet. If anthropologists have it right, this act caused our ancestors brains to grow a bit larger... life once again got a little easier. Then Java Man or Peking Man or both simultaneously discovered that you could tie the rock tool to a stick to give a little more power in cracking nuts, and now bones to get to the high protein marrow. The larger brain led our ancestors to invent even better tools with the bone splinters, and according to the experts in evolution, our ancestors were now able to speak, and started thinking in the abstract… life again got a little easier. Then we started speeding along the evolutionary path through the Paleolithic, Mezolithic, Neolithic, Bronze Age, Middle Ages, Dark Ages etc... now in our present situation in the Nuclear Age… I don’t know if life got any easier, but definitely more complicated. In my humble opinion, life is ever evolving in many different ways in every second of every minute of every hour of every day.
Some might define their existence by the quality of their life… they measure their meaningful being by their skill in obtaining money or material things. Others search out the spiritual or mystical meaning of their birth by meditating or attending church or participating in retreats in the desert for only $800 per person per day, where they can wallow in a mud puddle with other naked people… or they might even pay a motivator thousands of dollars to guide them to a better understanding of themselves… hopefully without dying in a sweat lodge in an Arizona desert.
Uncountable generations of people have hoped for something better than just life since our first ancestors climbed out of the mire of ignorance or the community mud puddle and started to think perhaps there was something better than just living… religious beliefs were born.
I feel that you have to be careful in seeking out the greener grass on the other side of the hill… if you find it; you might have to mow it.
Maybe what we have is the best there is… Didn’t God create the heavens and earth? Maybe when we die we get to replay our earthly experiences over and over again in the realm that God created. Look around you, what you see could be your heaven… or your hell. We do have free will to live our lives as we wish, good or bad. Does that free will have an influence on our eternal being? I believe that it would be great if we could go back to those joyful moments in our lives to repeatedly relish the glee we felt as many times as we want. Wouldn’t it be wonderful? Wouldn’t it be terrible if all we had to relive were dreadful experiences? That could be hell.
Maybe we should strive to live everyday as if it were the last… sooner or later it will be. What will your inventory of life experience hold?
Those with inflated egos might believe that their life has to have a mystical meaning. They probably can’t or won’t grasp the thought that their parents just had sex, which resulted in conception. Most of us, me included, just don’t want to dwell upon the idea of our parents having sex… the image can be just too disturbing.
When your children, who believe they are the reason for the universe, grow up, and they try to blame their neurosis on you, just tell them “Your problems are due to a genetic disorder that you inherited from your birth parents”… then walk away. That bit of information will probably keep them occupied for a while, and they might leave you alone, if that’s what you wish.
The millions of conscious or un-conscious decisions and actions that we take in the act of every day living in many cases bounce off each other to set off a whole new series of reactions which require further decisions. For example, if your spouse is storming about the house slamming doors while the leaves are falling from the trees in your yard and your favorite team is down by a field goal on their opponent’s 20 yard line in the final seconds of the fourth quarter, you should be careful in un-consciously asking “what’s wrong,” she might give you a life-altering or even life-threatening response, and you may have to wait until the nightly newscast to find out what happened at the end of the game.
Everyday stuff happens that can alter your life even when you’re not around to witness it. Daytime TV talk shows are just one culprit for this. I have never been a fan, however, according to my wife; I can appear on those shows almost every day, by proxy, because some show has a husband just like me. I try to explain to her that those people aren’t real… they are extroverts or even masochists. What normal man would agree to go on a daytime talk show with an audience of mostly women just so they could bash him for all of his faults? … Perhaps he asked his wife, “What’s wrong” then had to suffer the consequence of that dangerous question.
Even the government is increasingly trying to improve our quality of life or maybe even attempting to define life by telling us what we should or shouldn’t do… from who we should fall in love with to what we should eat or drink. If we were born sometime before 1950, the chances are, our mothers drank and smoked while pregnant with us… most of us turned out OK. Some of us even went on to become productive citizens who put man on the moon, and discovered that mothers who smoke and drink during pregnancy are potentially harming their unborn children. We improved society by inventing cable TV so the children of the future wouldn’t be deprived of unlimited cartoon channels like we were… we invented computers and video games so children also wouldn’t have to use their own imaginations for entertainment purposes. We even created fruity breakfast cereal without even having to use one bit of fruit! We invented fast-food and quicky-lube places for our fast-paced lives and instant gratification. We even remodeled the old movie palace with the seats covered in plush red velvet into the multi-plex theater complex where several shoe-boxed shaped black boxes offer several of Hollywood
We cemented in the dangerous creeks running through our neighborhoods and turned them into storm drains to prevent flooding and to keep children from drowning in their favorite swimming hole… they were becoming way too polluted for fishing or swimming anyway. In their places we built huge water parks with death defying slides with teenaged lifeguards, earning the minimum wage, hanging around talking to teenaged girls or boys and waiting to save a child from drowning… all of this for only a nominal entrance fee.
And after Vietnam we even eliminated the draft so now there is no need for junior to move out of Mom and Dad’s comfortable home and seek a deferment from the draft by going to college… after all there are over 100 cable channels to choose from and a multitude of video games to play, and junior can even stay on his parents health insurance policy until he reaches 26-years of age. Jobs are also plentiful either at the water park as a life guard or at one of the fast food places on darn near any corner of any city in the country. Life’s not so bad, is it?
Gone are the days when Mom and Dad can kick the kids out of the house when they turn 18… gone are the days when Mom and Dad can argue over whether to turn junior’s room into a walk-in closet or a space for Dad’s model train set layout.
