What is Life?

What exactly is life? Is it the expansion of your lungs as air rushes inward? The pulse of your veins as blood moves through your heart to the far corners of your body?

It is true that these things are certainly a part of living, and one cannot be said to be alive without them. Nevertheless, I don’t think anyone lying comatose in a hospital bed, their bodies kept alive though the mechanical advances of medical science, would agree that they were living. They are technically alive, but what kind of life do they actually have?

If then a beating heart and breath alone are not the full definition of life, what is?

We, as living breathing human beings, tend to experience our lives as a series of events, but, are these day-to-day occurrences life itself? With each passing day we move through the hours of daylight and nighttime in mostly repetitive cycles — eating, working, sleeping and so on; the next day arrives and we rise again to do the same things.

Even so, those who haven’t a job don’t work, and those without food don’t eat, and those consumed with worries seldom sleep. So, if these daily occurrences are not universal to mankind as a whole, can we call them life? We are alive but what we live varies— our individual experiences are different. Even two people caught up in the same event don’t experience it the same way.

So while events do make up a major part of living, they are not life in its entirety. What then is the whole meaning of life? Is it one thing, or many things? We know it isn’t just the state of being alive; we can see it isn’t just the things that happen to us.

This being the case, is life not also the things we do? Perhaps even the things we think? Life is not a simple word or concept, but moreover an amazing amalgamation of spiritual, mental and physical states of being.

What we do to ourselves, what we do to others; thoughts lead to actions, and often words lead to deeds. If you are alive, foul or fair, you’re living a life. So what are you doing? What are you saying? What are you thinking about? What’s happening to you as you take your next breath? Are you living, or allowing life to pass onward without you as though you weren’t alive at all?

In order to live, life in all its facets must me recognized — and maintained. For what is life if the body is neglected, the mind is burdened, and the soul is empty?

It isn’t life at all.