What is life?
This is one of the most popular questions ever.
Across space and time this question has been asked and has been interpreted in a variety of ways. Even today, we ask this question at some point in our lives and try to find some sort of explanation.
But, more often than not the answer ends up taking the same route.
When this question comes up, and we are in a mood to answer it, we tend to abruptly go into a stare while the entire world known to us comes into our imagination before we visualize our individual-self in that vast expanse. That is where the focus turns to us and this question becomes specific to our individuality.
What is life, actually? We ask ourselves and then we start to look at our life from the widest lens available to us: In terms of pain and pleasure. In terms of failure and success.
In a flash, all we have learned and all our sufferings and joys hit us and we think of birth, death, and everything in between. Then arises a conflict between all ‘good’ that has happened or might happen to us and all ‘bad’.
Our answer to that question is dependent on our state-of-mind.
We then begin interpreting the question in terms of suffering, challenge, obstacle and death. Then something we learnt from some ‘expert’ which inspired us the most is remembered and then we say things like:
Life is a battle. Life is a journey. Life is a challenge. . .
…and then our thoughts drift to our current objectives and we forget the question.
When we are in the cleanest and best of moods we may answer it differently. But the pattern is the same. We begin interpreting the question in terms of joys, pleasure, achievement, spiritual-moments and success. Then something we learnt from some ‘expert’ which inspired us the most is remembered and then we say things like:
Life is a song. Life is to be experienced. Life is a mountain which can be climbed…
…and then our thoughts drift to our current objectives and we forget the question.
It is not our fault that our earnest attempt to answer this elusive question ends with our personal hubbub. That is just the way humanity has brought itself up.
What is life? is not the type of question which establishes courses and curriculums and makes Universities compete with each other for the slice of pie. It is unimportant. It is useless. It even falls under the category of questions asked by daydreamers, slackers and losers. Who wants to be that!
What is electricity? What is computer? What is Entrepreneurship? What is Economics ?— these are the questions that matter!
Yet, the question is asked. Yet, the question has survived. It has survived Industrial Revolutions and Shut up and calculate. It is still being asked.
There is a reason for it being popular yet vague.
There is a flaw in the way the question is asked. This is why the answer always ends up with our personal balance-sheets.
The answer in fact is actually pretty straight forward:
Life is the duration between birth and death.
Yes, that’s all there is to it. A Life, both personally and collectively is nothing but the time between birth and death. It didn’t exist before birth and it doesn’t exist after death. Life therefore, is time. A duration.
Asking what is life? then is equivalent to asking what is yesterday or what is history. It seems to take us to metaphysical realms. But it doesn’t. The answer is simple. Going deep only makes us linger. This is the reason this question is stereotyped for day-dreamers and like.
So?
What we are really meaning to ask are these :
- What happened in life?
- What should be done with life?
- What is the purpose of life?
Now, these are concrete questions!
Such style of questioning provides relevancy to these questions too:
What happened yesterday, What happened in history; What should be done with yesterday, What should be done with the history; What is the purpose of yesterday, what is the purpose of history.
Life is the time between birth and death and is surely much-more than failures and successes. I think it is our duty and purpose to understand what those ‘much-more’ are.
Once again, this type of thinking is not encouraged by the prevalent power systems who cannot look beyond the amounts of wealth. Such systems want to us to worry about failure and strive for success. The more we worry, the harder we work, the greater they earn.
We have to take the initiative ourselves. We have to search, contemplate and create to find the answers.
I don’t think there is anything more important than knowing what is to be done with our life and following it.
These are the questions we are supposed to carry with us all the time and the answers we find should dictate our every thought and action.
Even the money we need is dependent on our answers.
