Dum loquimur, fugerit invida
aetas: carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero. (Odes 1.11)
“While we talk, envious time will have fled: pluck the day, trusting as little as possible to the future.”
After death, a person’s life value is measured by the impact they had on others. If they demonstrated positive traits such as kindness, selflessness, humor, and a sense of resilience, we decide they had a great and valuable life. What we don’t do is consider the value of a person’s life, and our own lives when we/they are still alive.
We might consider and often undermine the value of our own lives because that’s what we observe of others. We live in a society focused on the sole product of success: money. So in our lifetime, we measure the value of our life in comparison to others, about the amount of “success” we have reached, and in the opinions of others. I think the meaning and purpose of life are entirely subjective; only you can really decide what makes your life meaningful and what makes your life have value. But with that, you have to find a sense of being content to find purpose or meaning in your life. You have to be able to look around and be content with who and where you are in life. And with that, you have to move forward to get yourself to a place of contentment.
If you submit to the idea that you will never be good enough; that you are nowhere near where you need to be and that everything in your life has been and will be useless; then I suppose you could conclude that your life is meaningless and has no value. However, most people who say this do have value and meaning to their lives, they have families whom they positively impact or work that they do well; even if the best. Your life won’t have value if you dwell on your shortcomings alone, because you interpret it that way. The meaning of one person’s life often doesn’t come from the big accomplishments they achieve, their huge mansion, or the elaborate vacations they take. It comes from the small things like the family they have or the activities they love doing. The little things that give a life meaning can be the everyday, seemingly mundane abilities you have or constants that exist in your world that have meaning and when put together, you can derive your own place in them, your own value. This also involves the people and the experiences that you choose to interact with and surround yourself with, and your ability to be independent. To find value in ourselves and in our lives we must often be retrospective. Look back on where you started, where you are now, and how, even in the smallest of ways, you are doing at least something that you had once hoped to be able to do.
To contradict everything I’ve said thus far, here’s my list of things that without completing, will render me a life not lived, meaningless, and without value:
- Write and FINISH some sort of major work of writing
- Travel to more places than I could even think of off the top of my head
- Own whatever property I’m living in outright; and furthermore, be financially independent
- To have loved multiple times
- Work on a major peace negotiation/treaty
- I don’t know where my professional life will take me, whether I pursue journalism at some level, in conjunction with another career, or whether I do something completely different. I do know that I love to write, and I think my mark of a life well- and fully-lived life would include a finished work whether that be a book of poems, a novel, grouped writings, or a finished drama. My shortcoming as a writer has always been in the falling action, writing the end of anything and everything. I have always sort of thought that it is because I have not lived enough to know how or when to end something. So to be able to overcome this, would (hopefully) answer my question and produce a finished work. The finished work is first and foremost to prove to myself that I can actually finish something, but I hope that if/when I finish whatever this takes the shape of, I will want to share it, and will find it worthy enough to share, that is.
- It’s easy to say I want to travel more. I just said it. It’s also simple to say that I want to go backpacking through Europe and that I want to spend a year or two living in some place completely different from the US. But I want to travel to places I can’t pronounce (I just realized that’s a One Direction lyric), to places that I’m possibly afraid to travel to now, to places I have never even heard of. I once saw a video of a man who said that he always travels to countries right after they have terrorist attacks because he says everything’s cheap, there’s no one there, and security is great. I’m not actually going to adapt to this, but I do like that he’s not afraid, and that he wants to see the world.
- Oh to be financially independent. I was just listening to NPR while driving home last week and the radio stations were all messed up so it was either country (yuck) or this NPR segment on how to approach your parents about their financial situation. (Normally I love NPR but I really didn’t care about this lady and her elderly parents who needed advice on how to approach them on my Sunday afternoon) Clearly, I was not the target audience for this, but as I deal with the financial information regarding college, it wasn’t entirely irrelevant. The segment discussed beginning a long-term care plan so that children do not have to pay for long-term care for their parents should they need it, as well as how to approach a parent to find out if they have retirement savings or how much they own on the house. I know a lot of information about my parent’s finances, and even more about my grandmother’s because I manage a lot of it. And while both my parents and my maternal grandparents have thus far made good financial decisions, I cannot fathom, at this point, how I will get to where they are. I face a plethora of mountain sizes of loan debt to pay back heading into college. While I have already decided the maximum amount of money I will ever take out in loans to attend college, I still don’t know if I will see the return on investment to get me to where my parents want me to be, and frankly where I want to be; ahead of them with a higher salary and no money owed on my home. If I’m still living in the US, I would want precautions taken for potential long-term medical care so that I can truly consider myself financially independent. (This one went a bit off-topic)
- “‘Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all”. -Alfred Tennyson
Love and loss, based on love, seem to be the biggest creative proponents present in all mediums of art I consume or view. From this, I suppose you could say that I’ve learned that I need to love and be loved back in order to feel fulfilled in my life, but I probably wouldn’t necessarily agree with that. I want to love, but I don’t want to do it once. I think it’s idealistic and hypocritical to believe that you should only love once. Love can present itself in so many different ways, and I want to experience as many as I can. Living is learning, and love is something you can learn and grow from as you live. I want to love and do things wrong and have someone else do things wrong and then have realizations about myself and my life and LIVE. Maybe I’ve read too many books about the subject or watched too many movies but that’s exactly my point. The people who write those, they’ve experienced love in different ways and at different times and they can use that to create. I want to do that.
5. Ever since I heard of a concentration in “Peace and Conflict Studies” I knew that I had to someday obtain work in that field. Maybe it’s a lifetime of acting as a peacemaker in my own life that drives me toward this path, and maybe I’ll find out later that it isn’t the right work for me. If I’m being idealistic about career goals, I’d allow myself five careers in my lifetime; partly because I’m indecisive, and partly because I’m just so fascinated by each one. Problems and questions, particularly real-life ones that involve conflict or human rights issues are what get my gears turning. That’s where you’ll find me hunched over a computer or a notebook with a hand crap and eye strain, and I’ll still have a smile on my face because I’ll be doing what I love to do, solving these problems. I’m usually a person who loves to get questions right, and who thrives on the rush of a correct answer. But in these situations, all you have is the pressure and the problem, you don’t know what the solution is. That should absolutely terrify me, but instead, it ignites a passion. I should be deterred from this because all you can do is hope that you did the right thing, and do what I hate to do: wait. Instead, I do the waiting, the researching, the applications, the writing. At the base, it’s all about a solution. So in my lifetime, which will be successful if I’m able to fulfill some of these goals on the list, it would be the greatest privilege to serve and conduct peace negotiations and find a solution for a global problem or a civil war.
So how do I want to be remembered?
I’ve actually thought a lot about this. I had a phase once where first, I wanted to own a used coffin store (and yes I will still argue for this), and I wrote eulogies for my family members. The alive ones of course. And in doing so, I thought about what people might already say about me, and what I would want people to say. I’m sure that people would say things about how I was always so involved, so mature, so bright, and that I was a decent person, but regardless of what I can accomplish in my lifetime, I want people to remember how I helped people have fun.
I’ve (by and large) been the youngest at events and gatherings for family and friends, and been the “why does everything always happen to her” girl at everything else. And what does that mean? Everyone was always laughing at me. Or with me. I’m still not sure. Nonetheless, it was clearly my role early on to keep everyone laughing and keep everyone’s spirits bright. So I’ve tried to take that one in all parts of my life. I say stupid things around my parents and do silly dance moves, just to keep everyone laughing. I’m no class clown, but I believe one of the greatest gifts we have is the ability to laugh and to be happy. This isn’t my role with everyone, particularly at school (I’ll leave room for some others to grow their material :)), but I would want people to remember how much I made them laugh and how light things could be when we let them be. I hate false positivity in that a person can never be sad, so that’s not what I’m saying. What I’m saying is that everyone could use a bathroom joke a dance break or a silly voice to break up their day.