The Purpose of Life – A Reply to A Friend

A few blogs ago, a friend of mine emailed me regarding the article, The Sand Castle. Her question was what do I think is the purpose of life? She asked this question because she didn’t quite agree with what I wrote. Actually, I have been asking the same question for a long time now and every time I stumbled until a few years ago when I discovered the “answer” that I’m looking for. I was eager to write a blog about it but somehow I couldn’t because my view is somewhat controversial and could be quite disturbing. I was thinking of a better way to say it. It took me quite sometime but I think I know now. So here it goes. What is the purpose of life? Thomas Aquinas once said, the purpose of life is the pursuit of “Summum Bonum” or “Ultimate Bliss” whatever that means. However, I don’t believe that everybody is convinced. Well, to me, the purpose of life is what we wanted to be as we choose or better yet what we wanted to believe in. One could live a life base on the gospel truth that one has faith in. However, I like to stress here that what is important is not what we choose rather why we choose or choose to believe so at all. The simple reason is because we wanted to have a meaning in our life. We don’t want to get up everyday, do our daily rituals in life, eat three meals a day, and work our butt off to pay for the meals and go back to sleep only to repeat the same routine tomorrow, day in day out until the day we die. Instead, we wanted to have a meaning greater than the sum of the parts of our lives and a purpose beyond our short – lived existence. Whatever that purpose is, it should justify our existence. It should make us MATTER in the elaborate scheme called life. It should make us believe that the world will be a better place because we are alive! So my dear, believe in the purpose you want to believe in and I’m not going to convince you that yours is wrong and mine is right or that somebody else has a better purpose. Instead, I ask you to hold steadfast to your belief and lived according to it. Because if that purpose you believed in gave you the meaning of existence and makes you believed that you can make a difference with it, then that is the “right” purpose of life for you and nobody should say otherwise. Rene Descartes once concluded after a deliberate analysis, “ Cogito ergo sum”, literally, “ I think therefore I exist”. Well, I say “I exist therefore I should matter”. And what makes me matter is my belief in my purpose of life even if, it were a short – lived sand castle.