An epiphany concerning the meaning of life struck me the other day while almost stepping on a dead squirrel. I was walking home from work, entirely swept away by the river of thoughts raging through my head, when I decided to take a quiet back road as a short cut. I stepped off the curb and into the street without checking both ways like my mother had taught me many years before. I mindlessly pounded the earth below, taking each sacred step for granted. Then everything changed.
As I lifted my right foot up so that I could put it back down again, a process that had occurred without my noticing thousands of times before that and most likely thousands of times since this event, I noticed a pile of what was once a living, breathing creature resting beneath the sole of my sneaker. Everything froze. I held my breath, my heart stopped beating, and for the first time since before I existed, I experienced total silence. The seemingly endless and raging river of thoughts in my head stopped with everything else. It was then I believe I came to understand everything worth knowing.
To provide some context to this event, I had been contemplating the meaning of life for some time now. For several years, I had been attempting to reconcile opposing views on the concept of “meaning.” On the one hand, there was the classic argument that meaning preceded existence, thus giving all life a reason for living. From Aristotle’s concept of Telos all the way to a universe created by a God, the notion of a purpose-filled existence has guided the thinking of many of our world’s most popular ideologies. But, there is also the more existential opinion on this matter, most famously argued by Jean-Paul Sartre, that existence precedes meaning. If this notion is true, then all humans are entirely free to create their own meaning in an otherwise purposeless universe. My problem, and perhaps humanity’s longest existing problem, was trying to make sense of all this chatter.
What makes matters so difficult when contemplating the meaning of life, is the seeming validity of both arguments. Depending on the circumstance, either philosophy can appear to be true. But, luckily I ran into that dead squirrel to help me out…
In that moment of paralysis I realized all the arguing is quite ridiculous because the answer has been, and will always be, so simple that it really is no wonder that it has eluded our species since we managed to crawl out of the mud. The meaning of life is … life itself. To be alive. Why does it need to be anything more? Why does it need to be anything less? Why does it need to be anything at all?
