I am sick of searching for a meaning to life. I’m sick of being concerned with the lack of meaning in my life. Should there be any meaning in life? Is there any meaning in anyones life? I have started to wonder, maybe it’s a deep process of healing that I am entering or maybe another stage of the eternal paranoia that haunts me.
When I start to think about what life really is, what my life and anyone else’s life is, it starts to get more than deep. When I think about what life is, all the little things in my life seem irrelevant. Meaning causes pain, or should I say, has the potential to cause pain. Meanings and attachments are like little boxes with pain inside and for some reason, just sometimes, they explode on us causing pain to leak into our life.
The problem is that meaning-things mattering-is attachment and anything we are attached too has the potential to turn around and bite us.
A big part of Buddhism is about attachment, it’s the equivalent of sin, freedom from attachment takes you a good way down the road to liberation, which may well be the road itself. However, try dumping all your attachments and desires, it ain’t easy!
Perspective is a good way to look at the meaning of your life, its like being in a wood surrounded by trees, some you like the look of and take care of, some you don’t and some even fall down right in front of you. Because let’s face it, sometimes things just go seriously wrong. If it’s not happening too us, it’s happening around us. Loved ones dying, diseases, illness, wars, fights, arguments ect. When these thing start to happen around us, it becomes hard to focus and we wonder why we were worrying about all the other little things in our life at all. In one second in our life, everything that really mattered can suddenly loose all meaning.
When we think about wars, tsunamis, and earthquakes happening, our everyday lives suddenly feel very pathetic and irrelevant. But atleast we are still alive and our families are alive. Anything that sends our perspective up in the air – from a personal tragedy to a world tragedy, to seeing something that really makes us think – is just like saying a big FUCK IT to all the normal concerns in our life that we seem to get bogged down with.
When I think about who I am in the world, it gets a bit crazy.
I am one person in approximately 6.5 billion people on the earth, or 1 in 6,500,000,000. That’s stadiums upon stadiums full of people, all trying to find a meaning to their own individual life. We live on an earth that is travelling at approximately 67,000 miles an hour through space, round a fucking SUN that is the centre of OUR solar system. Just our solar system alone is a tiny spec within the entire universe. If earth was a pea and Jupiter was a strawberry, we would have to place them 100 meters apart, just to get a sense of the distance between us, and then imagine that in comparison to the ENTIRE universe!!!
And who knows, this universe could be one of many that is reborn over and over again over millions and millions of years, and where is our life in all of that?
If we spend 85 years on earth, which is probably better than average, but anyway, man has been around for 100,000 years so we are going to spend just 0.00085 per cent of mans history living on earth. And mans stay has been very short lived in the context of the life of the earth (4.5 billion years old). If the earth had been around for the equivalent of a day (with the big bang starting at midnight) humans didn’t turn up till 11.59.58PM, that means we’ve only been here as humans for the last 2 seconds!
Life is gone in a flash, there are relatively few people on this earth that were here 100 years ago, just as we will be gone soon. So, with the briefest look at the spatial and temporal context of our lives, we are utterly insignificant. We are like a small gentle light, our life is like a firefly lost in the cosmos and fireflies live for just one night. It glow beautifully, then goes. We are just one of 65,000,000 fireflies alive at this moment. Nothing more matters, apart from this small flash of light we provide…
So fuck it, we might as well glow right?
You forgot something. It”s a natural thing for any person, depressed or not to forget. Somehow, we are now raised to believe we must be important, make a stir in the world, yadyada.
Beauty. Our insignifant little planet gives us moments of beauty all the time for those who are willing to look. Have you ever sat next to a burbling stream, or watched the sunrise in the morning, and become content? Glad to be who and what you are in that moment in time? Perhaps even…become, for one second…something more than you are?
And for me, nothing is more beautiful than courage. From the seedling taking sprout amongst a bevy of natural enemies to the mother sacrificing herself to gain food and clothes for her children…courage can be found everywhere. A depressive getting up every morning, refusing to be beaten, still searching for moments of laughter, love and peace….despite the pain we know can be inherent in taking those risks….that”s courage. That”s beautiful. That”s worth living to see.
The answer isn’t in whether or not the universe would even notice that we’re there….or missing. The answer is in grabbing the living we’re entitled to, despite the odds against us.
What”s with the weird characters in there???
shit science thats really deep 🙂
i say glow 🙂
did u notice bob called u hairy that really made me laugh, brightened my evening! im lamenting lost love and the fact my heart is going to get bruised again……will i never learn.
i say science u are a cool chick and live each day like its ur last, easier said than done hey?
wish i lived nearer a lot of u guys, we could all go out and do naughty things to all those "normal" folk 🙂
love ya
lisa xxx
As much as we don”t matter to the universe, nor does everything inside us matter to us.
But we matter to it. There”s an opposite here, the smaller scale, and in all those strings and atoms and particles that make up us, there”s a soul, and our body matters to that soul.