What is Life?

This question was going to have to asked sooner or later in this blog - but it has been avoided because exactly where do you start? Well I'm ready to start ...

We think we know what Life is. This is why we pay it little attention. I'm reminded of Heideggar's opening of "Being and Time" however: 'Those of us who thought we knew what Being was have since become perplexed' (based apparently on a line from Plato I forget).

Those of us who thought we knew what Life was have since become perplexed.

I'll cut to the chase. If we can live Life without knowing what it is, then we don't need to know what it is! Or at least knowing what it is, is not important to living!

So there is the key that crystalised this morning as I awoke under a tree (taken to sleeping out again) watching the birds and the insects busying themselves: Life is actually nothing - it is the unjudgemental canvas or soil upon which we paint or grow our lives. This is why (upon realising this) we are able to accept whatever life throws a us without concern. Lose everything in the stock market, have our house burned down, have our whole family killed in a car accident, contract terminal cancer, even become faced with a gun in a bank hold up and lose one's life; or more positively win the lottery, get the job promotion, find the perfect job, get married, have a child, find ourselves famous and successful - whatever Life throws at us comes without judgement - for the canvas upon which it is painted cares not what pattern the colours make and the soil cares not whether the plants flourish or die. In the words of Kipling we really should be able to:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it all on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breath a word about your loss;

For in the grand scheme of life what is loss in one place is a win in another. Not literally - but to illustrate that it depends upon your franme of reference to see something as a win or lose. There are win-win, lose-lose, and win-lose outcomes for games - but the issue in Life is who chooses the games? A lose-lose game may be win-win in the larger game. Two armies may decimate each other in a battle, but find that the mutual defeat leads to a strong alliance and economic domination in another "theatre".

All the world's a stage and we merely actors. It occurred also during this investigation that my favourite questioning of "role" took a further development. We act out our roles not because of what we thinkwe are: but the acting out of roles determines what we think we are. In theory sleeping under the trees at night could make me into the role of a vagrant, vagabond or tramp. On the other hand it could make me into a romantic visionary. On the other hand it could just be plain "Tom Sawyer" type fun... to name only three "roles". I have a palette of narratives to chose from. It takes only a few people to chose one of those narratives for me and I may start to play that role. Once I am reading from the script then I start to believe I "am" that person - this is the origin of inauthenticity. Life has no definition and the script is fluid and changeable. But the mind cannot grasp at water for there is nothing to hold on to. So in confusion it grasps at the jug with water in it and believes that the jug is water. Of course in time the water in the jug goes stale and Life loses its edge.

So Life by definition escapes definition. Whatever game we think it is, whatever system of rules or descriptions we think it is, whatever role with set and stage directions we think it is: we forget that our definition belongs to a larger world from whose perspective the definition becomes quite inappropriate.

Politics is fashion. Why? because what seems so apt and sensible for a community at a moment in its history will seem quite idiotic and futile at another moment in its history. Take extra-ordinary moments in Britains history like the Crusades. It seems nonsensical to modern heads why people would waste so much effort on possessing a city: plain football in modern thinking. Stock-markets are fashion also hence "bubbles".

Life is a grander entity than anything that the mind can harness to grasp it... except the mind itself.

Returning to less lofty speculations on Life some challenges to the common held view of life. It seems easy to say when something is alive or dead. So surely we know what life is. Yet when an animal has many offspring and then dies itself we are left with more entities than we had before. Has Life multipled? What then is the unit of life? We say the individual but consider a sponge which can be broken down into separate cells. What of a sperm and egg fusing? Life is neither single or multiple... tbc