Kelsie Miller
English Comp
Definition Paper

From the moment we are born we begin to live. We learn and grow, but we begin to question our lives. We measure them with success of skills, friends, money, and love. In the end we look back and say that we either lived a good life, or we didn’t. What does that mean though? What is it to really live? Many have attempted to define it using concepts like reality, future, past, love, and family, but they all seem too straightforward. Defining something traps it, cages it into letters that have no real hope of fulfilling their purpose, but with no hope of defining it, what is life? It is written as, “The condition that distinguishes animals and plants from inorganic matter, including the capacity for growth, reproduction, functional activity, and the continual change proceeding death.” Is that all life is? Is it just the ability to grow, reproduce, and move until we die? It seems so grim that in the definition of life, life is only what precedes death. If it is so simple to just be alive and live, then how is it that so many can live life without really living? How is it that so often no matter how hard we try, it is so hard to find life in life? How is it possible that, if simply existing is living, that there seems so often to be no life in life? Many would say that life, as it is, is reality. If it is, then what is reality? We know only what we have been taught, shown, and fed. Each person perceives life and reality different depending on what they know, but that perception can change too easily. As soon as we learn something new, an idea we never thought of, the truth that had been hidden from us, our grasp on our reality shifts. That shows how little hold reality has on our lives; the idea had already been thought of, the truth was already there, but it doesn’t exist to us until we figure it out or are told. If life isn’t personal reality, then is it worldly? Does reality still change then? If you were to look outside right now, is it still the same as it was in the early days of America, as the Dark Ages, or as the days of the cave men? Reality is what is real, but if what is real can change so easily, there can be no true reality. Still without a definition, many would describe our lives by what our purpose is and how we fulfill that purpose. We are taught from a very young age that we are unique and that we all have a part in life, a destiny, but what could that be? When we try to find what we are meant for, we realize that everything that we could possibly do, everything we could possibly contribute, has been done before. There have been hundreds of billions of people who have walked this earth, but of those, we remember only thousands. Very few ever do more than simply live, die, and become forgotten; nothing more than a number of the past. If in the world, we can’t change anything significant enough to make a difference in time, what purpose can we have? We are individually one of billions, one whom if we were looked back at a hundred years from now, we may as well have not existed just as we can dismiss all those hundreds of billions before us. In our personal lives, we are raised to learn, to teach, then to teach someone else to learn. That cycle is often all we see as our purpose. Being a human means to continue your bloodline, then live for that next generation, devote yourself to their life, and die. That next generation then lives for the next, over and over without anything changing. This generation of families may as well be any other in any other time. How can a simple purpose like that be our life? We never really accomplish anything, we just enter into and continue the cycle. How can purpose define life when there is no real purpose? If simply existing isn’t living, and purpose doesn’t make a life, then is it possible that the act of living is the definition of life? Can we characterize our lives by what we have experience, what we remember, and the people