Spoiler: If you are looking for jokes and fun facts, you are looking at the wrong place. This is a very long article with deep reflection of my life that I hope can give someone inspirations.
Hi there,
Have you wondered what life is for?
When one is born, the destination is set – to death.
So why live? What is the meaning of life?
Is happiness all that life is about? What if we are unhappy? What is happiness anyway?
Such questions haunted me since my childhood. I didn’t believe in heaven or hell. I believed that God is not what is described in Catholicism, Islam, Buddhism, or any other religion. I determined to find the answers by myself.
In college I got to know the great minds that I had been oblivion to, and realized that all that I had thought of, someone had already summarized it, in better words and clearer logic. I was lost.
What could I do differently? How could I go beyond what the predecessors have done? If I couldn’t create my unique value, why would I exist?
I couldn’t bear the possibility of living a normal life – to have a stable job, get married, have a kid or two, raise them, get old, and die. If I could summarize my life like that, there would be no need to live through it.
So I did the only (sort of) different thing I could do at that time – go to a foreign country. My goal was simple: get to know a different culture to expend my view so that I can understand the world and myself better.
In 2008, I came to Pittsburgh, USA, in name of pursuing a master’s degree, knowing that I knew nothing about what I wanted to do. With luck, my major suited my strengths and the market. Despite the financial crisis, I found a job in New York and started my career as a software developer.
But of course, I had never had a career goal before, and a job was nothing to me more than a window into what a daily life of humans looked like. I was surprised and happy to discovered that “full time” only meant eight hours a day, which meant I had another eight hours to myself when I subtracted the time on bed.
Soon enough, I was captured by the diversified activities in New York, from Tae Kwun Doe to katana, from drawing to oil painting from photographing to violin. If I could think of an activity, I could find it in New York. Life was of so much fun that a thought hit me: maybe this is the meaning of life; maybe this is happiness.
Could it be so simple? Were I just to enjoy life and to do what I like? Surely that could be the answer when I were healthy and without worries. But bad lucks could come. One would go old. One would get sick. One would die.
The life span of a hundred years is just a blink in the scale of the universe. This humble thought had helped me through the difficulties of my life, and still held to me when I was happier than ever before. With no clear direction, I just lived under one motto: live the life fully while I can, so that I will have no regrets when I can’t.
Soon enough, I found the first sport that I was passionate about in my life: snowboarding. Born and grew up in a city that never snows, I don’t know why snowboarding is the sport for me. But somehow, I found snowboarding was something I wanted to do even when I was lying on the bed the day after snowboarding with every muscle aching like hell, even when I injured my wrists, my tailbone, and my back. I went to the mountains almost every weekend, getting up before 5am, sometimes even 3am, so that I could get to the mountains before 10am. In one season, I got from bunny trail to blue. In another season, I graduated from double diamond.
Now I understand others who are into marathon and other sports. Human bodies are built differently. One cannot be good at everything. And one thing cannot be good at by everyone. But if one who used to be hopeless at sports like me could find a sport that one could be good at and enjoy, one must be able to find something designed for them in other areas, too.
With such hope, I continued my exploration, and soon landed on a creative writing class. The moment I did it, I knew this was for me and was the thing that I wanted to do for the rest of my life.
No, I was not good at it at all. I could be stuck for hours without any thought on what to write. I might write something so bad that I wanted to delete right away. I would probably not earn enough for a living if I ever fancied to turn it into a career. Nevertheless, it was not like violin, painting, or even snowboarding, which were good hobbies that I enjoyed but would not ever say that were the meaning of my life. Writing is the meaning of my life.
Ever since childhood, I had fictions playing in my head to distract myself from the daily tedious activities and pains. At first, I twisted the fictions I read into side stories. And then, I started to create my own worlds. I had never wanted or thought of those fictions read by another else. But the creative writing class gave me one thought: why not?
Of course, compared to career writers, I might be starting a bit late. But if I can get from bunny trail to double diamonds in two years, I should be able to catch up in writing, too, provided that I made enough effort.
So here I am, writing this article that possibly no one but myself would read while dreaming the big dream, happily, as I think I’ve figured out the meaning of life for myself and is living toward it.
True, one day I will still die.
But my works will not.
The universes I create will still exist
in the imagined world
real for the characters in it
just like the one we are living in.
Hey,
how do you know you are not
characters of someone’s
imagination?
June 8th, 2018 in Brooklyn, New York
By S. G.