by Ray Newman, radio and television commentator, attorney, educator, author

Friday, February 5, 2010

FORTUNATELY, LIFE IS MEANINGLESS

There is no meaning to your life exterior to how you choose to live it. Shock!

There is no purpose to your life outside of what you choose to do with it. Shock!

There is no Grand Plan in which your life has a particular role. Shock!

Or if you think there is, prove it to me. (Don't ask me to prove the absence of something...he who asserts the positive carries the burden of proof because only the existence, the reality, of something can be shown to be true.)

You are alive. The elements of which life is composed came together and formed YOU. You are a state of existence. Rejoice in that fact, be pleased, delighted, thrilled, enraptured, by it...or not. Your life, your choice. Imagine the potential pain you would suffer if the meaning and purpose of your life were actually predetermined and conflicted with what would have been your choice. Regardless of toward what end you lived your life, you would likely feel a sense of dissatisfaction, incompleteness and uncertainty. Is that not where most people are today on this important issue?

We have been misguidedly taught for centuries to search outside ourselves for the meaning of life. Expressions like "I was born to be...", "It was intended that I...", "It was written in the stars that...", all feed the fallacy that the meaning of our life is to be found "out there". We have been told that we are a tool of a god's design, a vital link in a cosmically unfolding eternity...and that is in those areas that we must seek the answer as to what life is all about. Most of us never find it, even after a lifetime search and contemplation.

For good reason. The ultimate significance of our life resides within us. It is something we must design, shape, fashion, create, for ourselves, as we do our individual character and identity. We do not acquire it by default, but by choice and action. It is as petty or as grand as we dare to make it, and as we can make it. It is not cast in stone. It is our own, special and unique creation.

And it is a creation to be refined every moment of our lives.

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