This story represents the opinion of an individual, the opinion is not intended to attack anyone’s religion or philosophical views of the world and does not seek to suggest that this opinion is the only valid opinion on this issue.
At some point in your life, you have asked yourself the question. The question that answers all questions: the ultimate question, the question of life. It’s so freaky when you really think about it. Are we all just pawns in oligarchs’ games? Are we all just puppets in the name of our puppeteers? Are we all just stones whose life stories will be carved out by our sculptors? Is the world’s expectations for you just what must be done?
The ultimate question has the answer to everything: why people die, why people are born, why people cry, why people laugh, why people do cruel things, why people do good things, why people thrive, why people just survive. Yet at the core of it, the question lies not in why people do people things, but simply why people are people.
As we move through the phases of life that human society has created, change occurs; we will never be in the stage we are in right now ever again, so relish in it before it is out of our grasp. You will never be in elementary school again, you will never be in middle school again and you will never be in high school again.
This stage we indulge in right now is the final stage of human society before we make the choice of who we want to be, whether that choice is to further our education, join the workforce, enlist in the military or become a part of a nonprofit. High school is your final stage before adulthood, before you take accountability for all your actions, before you start to pay bills and before you are legally the only one responsible for yourself.
The next stage of our life will be the longest stage, the one in which we use all the knowledge and life experiences from our previous stages to help make the world a better place. Yet, adulthood is the stage you will learn the most in, the stage you will experience the most intense and diverse emotions; this is the stage we will be at our peak before we reach the second to last stage.
When we roll down our sleeves, sit down with a cup of tea looking out at the summer breeze and look back at our past, at our accomplishments, our faults, our losses, our jokes, our life’s sauces. Then we reach our final stage of life, death…
Death should not be solely sad. The inevitable will one day become the present, and when it does, we can look back at our lives and say to ourselves, “Wow, the world is so beautiful!” To that I would say, the world is so beautiful because it’s not perfect, because there’s room for change, for movement. So when we shed those tears of sorrow that our time is up, we should also shed tears of joy that we had time at all. And even though we will never know the answer to life, we cannot omit the question from our lives.
When asked the simple question of what everything is and why we do it all, the answer is simple: no one knows. And we probably will never know ‘til the end of time, but one thing that can be said with certainty is that if the world was not meant to be, it would be a void, but it isn’t… so live it.
