PostPoems Be Artistic. Be Creative. Be Inspired!

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The Meaning of Life

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What is the meaning of life? From time to time over the decades that question pops up unexpectedly like an uninvited guest for dinner. Like what is real? aka What does it mean to be? What is existence? We had fun with Dick and Jane in Ethics over that one. Why are we here? No that one is never going to be answered, but I’d like to take a turn around the dance floor with the meaning of life. But before I begin, the classic questions of the ages will set the tone a priori. Is there a god? Is there life in space? Are there ghosts? What is death? Was Rome built in a day? Who killed Jimmy Hoffa?

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Feel free to add your own classic questions. They are multitudinous. Dissecting the question is a good place to start – what does meaning mean? (I think we all agree that we understand the opening – What is the…) Meaning can be parsed objectively, personally, infinitely, epistemologically, philosophically, comedically, or by using a dictionary. But I am a fair poet and prefer to make up my own POV and means of investigating meaning. To have validity is a goodly phrase. A thing proven. A gerund for treating someone badly (as in the meaning of America). Badly has merit and the question: “What is the meaning of life” implies that someone has been treating life shabbily. Truth told, Life would have been a great character in my Elementals series. So would meaning, for all and that. Life is the answer to more questions asked anywhere, yet the meaning is illusive on a certain plane. Globally, life is a complex of chemicals and animated microbes, but that is biology and the life we wish to explore like a newly discovered continent is about life as an entity that is fulfilling, denotative and not connotative.

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My approach starts with family. You get no choice in those characters who are as diverse, good, strange, and evil as the people you meet later in life. Ah another definition: life is the sum total of every place, encounter, feeling, or happenstance that you experience temporally. Hmmm… Family defines you. I ask myself at the age of 63 if I could chose any family to have been mine, who would I chose? I’d choose my family because they are the force that made me the eclectic, curious, manic, intellectual, success as a human being and I would not trade it for gold. (And gold is soaring in price per ounce, I hear).

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But they gave me most of my early on definitions most of which I was shocked to find out and out wrong. You state to people you meet, care about, want to think you are smart those things taught at home and end up so embarrassed that you stop using family as a base. Apparently, you can drop portions of your life and pick up new ones. Undoubtedly, life is overwhelmed with family input as is meaning. Life is not the opposite of death, because we have no idea what death is, only suppositions. Ah but the ghost question does hover.

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To love, to revere , and to hold sacred is equal to adoration, respect, and sanctification. I love the verse: I am the truth and the life, no man entereth into the Kingdom but by me. Jesus is life – oops forgot What is truth? Thus, for me, meaning is what you bring to your lifetime’s  table. And all those books you read, fit in there somewhere, all the plays, movies, news broadcasts, and commercials embellish meaning. After that, Life is standing in the doorway rubbing her eyes and shaking her head negatively.

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My life was spent writing poetry which gave it meaning. How do you give away meaning. Or grant meaning? Blessed or lucky (for the secular reader) comes with healthy children born with 10 toes, marriage, wealth, fame, and a book (or record deal or movie role). Wealth or the absence of it certainly impacts meaning of life. Are quality of life and the meaning of life distant cousins? I think yes. Poverty is a thing to avoid especially in the USA.

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Surprise is absolutely a component of meaning. Dull living and loneliness and boredom leads to drug use and alcoholism, abusiveness and all things ugly and prison worthy, so a little shock keeps you in tune with the mores, laws, and values of your region. (That is, of course, if we are going with life as the time span between the unremembered birth experience and the anticipatory posture toward the end of breathing and no longer metabolizing, excreting, and having erotic sexual fantasies).

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Personally, imagination is a slice of life. Imagine life without the ability to machinate, create out of nothing, impose meanings of the most preposterous kind on yourself and anyone who bumps into to you. Bam and wham “I know it’s not true, even silly, but I made it up from my brain and means what I say it means.” Yeah, that’s some kinda summation for meaning in life, not of, not meaning of life.

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God put us here is too simplistic an answer. Buck passing has never been my way, and so I embrace a collaborative effort between deity’s omniscience (the grand ultimate meaning of life and everything else like the inanimate, and planets, the universe, and infinity) and my creative matrix (an infinitely smaller paradigm).

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So, in summary – the meaning of life has many facets, but is mostly time (and what you do with it) and experience and really good pizza which pretty much are the proofs I looked for all my life to nail down life and meaning’s meaning.. Hey, I didn’t know. I had an Epiphany. Peace. I’m outta here!

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Lady A

07-23-13

4:25a

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