What’s it all about? One day slips into the next and each follows the other with relentless predictability. We begin, we grow, we mature, we shrivel we end. But why? What is life exactly? What is the point of it?

I suppose I’m just sitting here pondering this question – a question I’ve pondered many a time before – and in doing so am aware of the conundrum, significance and implicit futility of that act: Life asking question of life – of itself! But still the questions burn for an answer. I mean all one has to do is just stop and look around and see the motion of life fizzing and buzzing in every direction as if some great masterplan is at work to feel the question whispering within. But is there any plan?

Does every movement, action and decision taken by every living thing in this world move to the tune set out upon some concealed music sheet? . . . Surely not? And not just life by the way – all things organic and inorganic that compose the fabric of this physical universe we inhabit. Does everything that IS, WAS and WILL BE move and function as some vital cog in the wheel of providence?

Often, in difficult times, we tell ourselves that this or that was meant to happen – was always going to happen – and in so doing absolve ourselves from any responsibility. We surrender to a belief in some predetermined way of life (when it suits us) without consciously absorbing the significance of what that belief implies. And then when things go well, how easily we move to claim our part.

Atheists reject all notion of a God or Gods being the great creator(s) of all that is. They look to scientific method and applied intellect for their reasoning and understanding. They seek not to believe but to KNOW, to verify, and this is to be applauded. It is measured progress and knowledge through stealth and creative thinking. Theists believe that there is some divine creator who set all this into motion and decreed paths for us all. They believe that the complexities of life, as revealed through science, serve to illustrate the power of the almighty creator. They believe that science begins and ends with the Big Bang and the proposed eventual Big Collapse, but that outside this domain – what came before and what will come after – is the realm of God.

But either way, regardless of your standpoint, the question remains. What is the point of it? If we are just evolutionary arrived at self aware complexities that will stop being aware when we die – what was the point of it. If on the other hand we live on in spirit when we die, the same question can equally be asked. To what end? I mean we continue to exist in some spiritual form, but why?

Personally I do believe that we live on in some form of afterlife, and I will be so happy to be reunited with my son when this happens. But the bigger question still persists: why? Could I lose my son again in that afterlife – separated painfully for some indeterminable period of time as he or I move to yet another dimension. Where does it end? Indeed where does it begin?

Why any of it?