Saturday, January 26, 2008

The Meaning of Life

Life, all creatures great and small, including the bugs, birds, pumas, you, me, has no specific "meaning". Nevertheless, "What is the meaning of life?" has been a question whose answer has been pursued by human beings from the dawn of time and has not gained any consensus yet till now. For different individuals, even in different periods of one person’s life, the answers may completely different. As for me, now, the meaning of life is just being myself, which listens quite easy, but actually not.
Young children always have some rainbow but not practical dreams. So did I. Becoming a little witch who is able to handle miraculous conjurations, living in a cabin near to a brook in the forest with rabbits, squirrels, deer and even young tigers, going back to the archaic China, such as Tang, Song dynasties, all of these above always became beautiful stories in my mind and I myself was the protagonist of them. However, they were just dreams and only can be dreams. Now I understand, to be myself, the most important step is to nail down a goal. In another word, I should know exactly what I want. Only if there is a goal, we can set a plan; only if there is a plan, we can start to prepare. Thus, different goals are supported by different plans, and then different plans lead us to different ways of life. As young child, my goal was being a good girl to both teachers and parents. Became little older, my goal streamed to gain regarded academic achievements and a career offering fat salary. In the future, my goal might change to building a warm family with gentle husband and lovely children, or just remaining single and travelling around the world. (Anyway that is the matter of future.) Conclusively, the goals of life make me realize myself which is the first step to make life meaningful.
Having made my direction clear, I started to consider how I can make all of that in my mind come true. Hard workings, unremitting, and self-confidence, are all essential for reaching the final target. But all these are common characters the successful people possess. What different is that the feelings on the way. Different people may have different reflections to the same thing. I believe keeping thinking can always help remain us on the right direction and learn more during the progress. The ways of thinking are specialized by individuals, which directly lead to different behaviors. For instance, if there is a mountain interdicting the way of a railway, the engineer who is responsible to designing should consider how to solve the problem. Someone may choose to get the mountain through in order to make the railway as short as possible, while the others may prefer to bypass it due to environmental reasons. As a result, they will experience processes of thinking, searching, reconnaissance and survey, planning, and series of actions completely different, but, eventually, they achieve the same goal.
Another point of being myself, I believe, is holding an attitude of peace and independence to everything. Someone has said,”Walk the way of you yourselves, and leave the others’ words alone.” That is to say I do not have to care too much about the comments on me from others and what I have gained and lost. It contributes quite a lot to keeping clear-headed and not being confused by instantaneous emotions.
The meaning of life is so profound a question that requires me to pursue with untiring efforts in the rest of my life. All above are just some incomprehensive understandings of mine, as a young teenager.

1 comment:

Brad Blackstone said...

Thank you for this heart-felt and insightful response. You may only be a teenager, but you an excellent job of surveying the significance of the question of the meaning of life. I especially like the way that you let your imagination roam freely.

I look forward to reading more of your post this term, Xuejie!