What is Life?
What I love about listening to music is that moment when a single line in a song catches your attention, stopping you in your tracks. When in amongst the melody and rhythm, almost by accident, a big idea is sung with seeming nonchalance, encapsulating a thought that sometimes goes far beyond the sentiment of the song itself.
Being a words person, it isn’t surprising that I would pay particular attention to lyrics, which are, of course, nothing more than our modern form of poetry. Just like poetry, despite the triteness of pop music or blatant misogyny of hip-hop or formulaic banality of R&B, songs are designed to make us feel and think.
And over the last week, one line from one song from a one singer-songwriter, new to my playlist, has had me contemplating the biggest question of all time, the question to end all questions…
What is the meaning of life?
As soon as I clocked it, I felt the line – which appears in the last stanza of an Italian pop song – gives us a pretty good answer.
It tells us, what is life if not learning how to live life?
This simple revelation blew my mind. That’s exactly it, I thought! Life is nothing more than LEARNING how to live it.
We’re not born with an innate ability to confront life, no. From the moment we are born we are constantly learning. Day by day, we pick up little tips and tricks for dealing with … stuff.
Life, is one big learning curve.
Just as we’ve gotten a handle on one thing, something else comes along to teach us a new lesson. And it doesn’t stop when we get into adulthood. I learnt how to deal with things in my 30s that I didn’t know how to deal with in my 20s, and so on into my 40s, and now, even into my 50s, and I have no doubt I will learn new things into my 60s and beyond.
To me, this one line has neatly wrapped up the purpose of getting up every day, of going to work, of putting up with annoying, petty people, of dealing with difficulties, of going through heartbreak or suffering illnesses. The purpose of confronting death…it’s to learn how to overcome all of it.
And the thing that has struck me the most as I’ve contemplated the concept is this – we learn to live life on our own. Each of us takes our own individual lesson from our own individual experience. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a parent, a partner, a single person, a man or a woman. In fact, you don’t need a wife or a husband or a friend to learn how to live because you learn life your own way, with or without these people, and thank goodness, because we know that these relationships don’t always last forever.
Sure, let’s be honest, having an ally makes it easier, but it isn’t a deal breaker. You can absolutely learn to live life on your own, and, in my opinion, you should. Because only by learning to live life on your own can you be truly sure that you can rely on yourself to make it through. Better yet, when you can rely on yourself to survive, you are free to choose only the best people to complement your life; people who will bring you joy and laughter and love, which is all we should be expecting of others.
I’m grateful for all the lessons I’ve learnt on my own over the years, they allow me the pleasure now of sitting back to observe others as they struggle through the curve they’re on. I can look at them and think, I remember being like that, acting like that, feeling like that, until I learnt to let it go and just…live.