What is life?

BKYTH · ‎04-12-2015

What is the life that we should/ought to expect? Like so many who have made posts on BB I could recount accounts of difficulty and seemingly impossible situations that one is confronted with. But what is it that it should be? I wonder if we exhaust ourselves in some 'otherwise' that we insist that our lives should be? Does the life we would hope for exist as commonly as we, in our despair, would wish for ourselves? It may be that this 'otherness' is more a fantasy than a fact. There is much that ails the people of this world and experiencing a mental illness does not of itself separate us in some unique way from others. Suffering is a part of every persons experience and if that suffering is grounded by a 'diagnosis' then it is not more unacceptable than that which isn't. The human condition can be diagnosed but remains forever beyound such simplistic analysis. Where an understanding, a diagnosis is applicable, then the situation is malleable and can be approached in various means but suffering has a much broader basis than our terminology would allow. Suffering is a complex issue especially if we resist it and see it as something that we should reject as incompatible with our vision of life as it should be lived or experienced. Perhaps it is that our aversion to suffering, our desperate desire to avoid it that attaches us to its cause. To accept that suffering is inseparable from life can enable us to sustain ourselves in the face of it because it demands something more from us. We are compelled to be be more than we've had to be before. It asks of us to find that within ourselves which have never yet had to discover. Don't let the darkness ask of you. Ask of it. Bkyth.

BKYTH · ‎06-12-2015

I can understand a little of your situation. I think the only meaning in life is what we can bring to it. If examined it offers nothing of itself. People in TWC aren't averse to suicide. Please don't idealize family life as it can often be far from ideal or loving. Those with a mental illness suffer in the way they do. Those who don't suffer from a mental illness equally suffer. I am on the verge of homelessness again and food is just a memory. What are your circumstances? The psychological theories you mention are just words from dead people. You are asking profound questions and assuming much. I don't say that as a criticism because I know something of your anguish. Don't use mental illness as a 'reason why'. If we want a 'reason why' we always find one. The world is full of them. Suffering is tough stuff but don't justify it. The capacity to suffer is something we need to discover within ourselves. Philip.

geoff · ‎07-12-2015

dear Philip, I take your comment ' Consider those who never lived long enough to experience them' as a good point raised in the article you mentioned.

Remember when we were young and our grandparents or even parents told us that you WILL (not could) get emphysema if you smoke at a young age, and the common reply was 'it won't happen to me', so they dispute what we have said, the wiser older person who has had the experience and watched as their friends pass away from this lung disease, so the meaning of 'what is life' changes as we get older.

Another example is 'don't wear your hat because you will go bald', and the same reply from the young one as well.

There are numerous people I knew who ran or did 'speed walking' everyday, because we were also told that this will keep us fit which has many connotations to it, but then suddenly drop dead, so this then reverses the idea of getting lung disease and the old telling the young what they shouldn't do, and now the young telling us oldies 'you must keep fit'.

The people born in a TWC would probably be born into a country where everyone is depressed, and the reasons why are plentiful, compared to someone born into a country like we were born in.

So what is life becomes even more complicated. Geoff.

BKYTH · ‎07-12-2015

I think the question is a rhetorical one and I ask it as one. Everything changes as we get older. I don't understand the point you are making in your post. The young feel immortal and that is a luxury of youth while time and experience reveals the falsity of that assumption. Perhaps the older person who exercises does so because they choose to and not because they are told they should. Exercise does not ensure that we will have a longer life. Nothing can give us that assurance but some activities are more conducive to that being likely to be the case. But there is no certainty. I think to say that everyone in a TWC would probably be depressed is a gross generalization. Poverty does not necessarily entail despair any more than wealth ensures happiness. A point you made yourself. I think the question of 'what is life ' is not a complicated one nor can become more complicated. It changes as everything else does. When I started this topic I did so not to elicit an answer or answers but rather as a question each of us should consider because I find in many people an aversion to the suffering that they experience in life which is understandable but unrealistic. Life unfolds as it does. Some things we can effect by our actions and decisions other we can't, and to me it seems that, our ability to confront suffering as it presents itself in our own lives and the lives of others is a central aspect in the understanding of our common human condition with all of its vulnerabilities. Philip.