Page 98 of The Warmth of Our Closest Star

What was life? The purpose? Its meaning?

Ambling through shallow puddles left on the sidewalk by the lazy, uncommitted rain, I wondered if I’d finally come to a conclusion.

In my three decades of life, maybe I hadn’t had enough time to discover the correct conclusion about life. Maybe no one was ever afforded enough time for such a thing. It was possible that one could live to be the oldest human alive and still draw the wrong conclusion about life. However, it was possible that I had figured out life in a way that made sense for me, and thus, came to a conclusion that was as good as I needed it to be.

The meaning of a person’s life does not have to be correct. It doesn’t have to make sense for everyone or align with what they feel is correct. It simply has to be true for the person who is living the life in question.

Stopping in the middle of the sidewalk, I held the bundle against my chest tightly, the plastic bag of cherries dangling from the fist in which it was clenched. I turned my face up to the sky, letting the mist tickle my cheeks and forehead, dampen my eyebrows and hair. I had nowhere important to be, so a little mist would hurt nothing.

Many people think—and I had been told—that death gave life meaning. Without death, life means nothing.

I don’t feel that is true. Death is merely a stopwatch. A timer. The endpoint where a person’s possibilities run out. If you haven’t found your meaning by that point, well…you’re shit out of luck, I suppose. Yet, it’s not death that provides meaning at the end of a life. It’s everything that happened before that moment. Death was simply the stopping point so that those events could be considered as a whole.

Here is the entirety of your life.

Let’s figure out its worth. If it has any.

In that way, I suppose purpose and meaning cannot be calculated without death, but death is not what provides either.

It’s possible that there is something after life, something greater. And we can discover our purpose and meaning there.

I’ve come to love possibility, but I’m a bit petulant. I’m impatient.

An afterlife is not something I can wait for when I’m uncertain if it even exists. And, if I’m honest, even if I knew for certain that there was an afterlife I simply have to wait for, that would not solve my impatience. I’m not alive so that I can wait.

To wait is not a purpose in which I’m interested.

People seem to think that the opposite of life is death. If you’re not alive, you are dead. So, they must be the antithesis of each other. That’s not true either. They are the starting and stopping points on a timeline that is not linear, even if that is how human perception works. If you believe in an afterlife, they are not even the beginning and end points. They’re simply points. They become wholly insignificant, especially in the search for purpose and meaning.

So, I suppose, to figure out what gives life meaning, if it’s not death, one has a conundrum. Certainly, death cancels out life. At the end, death is the stopping point for all life as we know it. A person can no longer add to the history of their life when death comes. That’s it. Death is final. Maybe. No one knows until that moment comes.

So, what cancels out death?

If life and death are not opposites, surely at least one of them has an opposite.

What is the opposite of death?

What is a life without possibility? And how does a person find possibility?

Creation.

We create. The things a person creates, what they bring forth into the world, the things that will remain after they are gone, when death comes, are what give life meaning. It’s what gives humans purpose—the things they create.

It could be art. Machinery. Technology. The discovery of fire. A working postal system. A well dug for a village to grow crops and nourish its people for generations to come. A needed kindness. A teacher explaining why two-plus-two equals four to a child. Having a child.

These things live on, in some way, when a life ends. They are there to contribute to humanity. To life. Their creation gave meaning and purpose to another and created possibility for numerous others. Some creations—such as the discovery of fire—haven’t only given meaning and purpose and created possibility—they changed the course of human history.

So…creation is the opposite of death. With creation, death is never truly final. Even if there is no afterlife and at the end of our days our vision simply goes black and we cease to perceive the world ever again—we’re simply a shell in the ground or ashes in an urn—we still exist.

Because we created. We raged against death and insignificance. And won.

A victory that can never be taken away until everything ceases to exist.

The only thing left in the whole wide world to decide, if one accepts this proposition, is what to create.

The possibilities are infinite.

Something, once created, can alter a life forever.