My perspective on “What is Life?”
Most of us would have asked ourselves this silly question: “What actually is Life?”. Some of the ways we answer these are: life is about doing meaningful work, life is about contributing, life is about passion, life is about being happy or life is about taking care of the people we love.
Well, all these answer some aspect of “What is life?” but based on my learnings and experiences I feel like they all miss an important point. Here’s my perspective: Life is about progress, life is about learning to progress and improve every single day. Life is about looking for answers to all the questions we are curious about, Life is about learning to deal with all the emotions and ups and downs that we face on a daily basis. On a bigger level, that’s what is the innate motivation for evolution as well right? Let me give an example: There are a lot of times that we go through some kind of negative emotions which is definitely not being happy as some of us expect life to be and in order to deal with these emotions, we try to find solace among external things and events like friends, fun, bars, validation, attention, etc but do we really come out better and learn how to deal with our emotions? I would feel no. Well, the same pattern will emerge in the future if we deal like this. To live a better and more meaningful life, it’s imperative to learn how to deal with these emotions in-depth and cleanse our bodies of those emotions in a spiritual way. There are a lot of books that focus on spirituality and specifically how to deal with emotions effectively through meditations, etc. The most important reason to clear the emotions internally is so that in the future when the same patterns (or cues) re-emerge, the emotions are not repeated. Until I was 25, I used to believe that life is just about being light-hearted 24*7 and about having fun among people you love. Those are totally fine as long as we are learning every aspect of life and having progress. My personal experiences, ups and downs, and reading books by some great authors have refined my definition. Life is not about being happy 24-hours but learning to come out of anything that a human is going through. It's about being resilient.
What are your views?