For no particular reason, I found myself echoing a thought that I first heard worded by a departed Uncle as a statement: 'That is not a good way to live.' The obvious question becomes, 'What is a good way to live?' - and that isn't the question that occurred to me. The question that came to me was, 'Why is it that as I was growing up, no one asked me how I wanted to live?'

Childhood has the mandatory, "What do you want to be when you grow up?" And adolescence brings the parental question of, "What are you going to do with your life?" But no one ever asked me how I wanted to live. Maybe I'm the only person who has encountered this - maybe everyone else on the planet has been asked that question but me. Still, I can't help but wonder what a younger version of me would do when posed with the question

How do you want to live?

as opposed to

What are you going to do?

'Do'. Do this. Do that. Do both. Action! But living is more than just... doing. And I can't help but wonder if I was less focused on doing for the sake of doing - for the sake of answering the nagging question implanted by so many... and more focused on how I wanted to live... I wonder what that impact would have.

Granted, I figured out the question on my own. But it is an interesting thing to consider. Would I have spent less time working and more time on the beach? Would I have spent less time in front of a television and more time having discussions with books?

I don't know. But I think when people are young, they could afford to be asked how they wish to live more often. How do they want to interact with this world, how do they want to be treated, how do they want to be treated, how do they want to spend their time, how do they want to make a... living. Wait a minute.

Make a living: Doing. There's an interesting phrase. Since when did work become so central to living? { Read more }

Sooner or later, a pattern emerges. Sometimes we never see it emerging, and it ends in mystery – such as when people die before their illness can be diagnosed, or when a relationship ends before it can be understood, or when a species dies out before anyone even knew about it. Sooner or later, a pattern emerges.

So it is with man's search for meaning. Is it possible that man's search for meaning results in the search for meaning itself? Is it possible that simply by trying to understand why one is here one is answering the question? Patterns do not lie. Religions and philosophies orbit humanity, held together with the gravity of a search for meaning. Some claim to find meaning in religion and philosophy, be it in a deity or lack of a deity. Either way, there is faith involved – be it the casual faith of an atheist in a lack of a deity or the more rigorous faith of believing in a deity. The search for meaning is not found in religion or a lack of religion – it is only punctuated by it. In every philosophy and religion, we idolize those that we believe obtained meaning.

Meaning is not found in tradition. Tradition only gives a context, and religion inherits this. Any religious text only prescribes a methodology for finding meaning – or not finding meaning but accepting a certain level of meaning, perhaps to keep one from poking too many holes in one's own mind in the late night. { Read more }