Staircase Wit: In Which Our Author Reflects On The Point Of His Life and Waxes Verbose

So I was recently asked (indirectly) what the point of my life was. Why do I bother to get out of bed in the morning? I put a bit of thought into it, and my conclusions follow.

Some people have real, concrete purposes to their lives. They know without a doubt why they go to work in the morning and why they come home in the evening. They can define their reasons and, if they're really lucky, they can hold them. They're things like "watching my children grow up," "healing my patients," or "collecting every Transformer ever." Other people, though, never think about why they're alive. Their heart beats by itself, they breathe automatically, and that's good enough for them. If pressed, they might tell you that waking up sure beats the alternative, but they couldn't tell you why.

Until recently, I sort of thought I was among the latter. There are things that I enjoy and people I love, but nothing that really gives my life purpose. There's no alternate universe where Schererville is renamed Potterville because I wasn't in my high school improv troupe, or where my brother's dead because I wasn't around to be good at reading. So why do I get up in the morning? What is it that I'm living for?

Well, the more I thought about it, the more I realized that the answer was in the moments. Moments like this afternoon, when I sat talking in the dining court for two hours, making friends out of acquaintances, or later when we had a snowball fight in the middle of the street because we're adults and we can. Moments when I'm on stage, and I'm in sync with my closest friends, and a hundred strangers are invested in our every move. Moments when my grandma calls and asks why her doctor gave her these pills, and I can tell her why and give her back a little precious control. Moments when I'm studying for anatomy and chemistry and physics, and I'm struck by the staggering complexity of the world, and I remember that I and all of my experiences are a part of that world and are inseparable from its inherent miracle.

Those are the reasons that I'm alive, and the unpleasant stuff in between, the pop quizzes and the practices and the drama and the stress, that's just part of living in an entropic universe. I accept that I have to do work to get results. And maybe one day I'll be blessed with a tangible, enduring purpose, but until then I live for the fleeting instants of insight and connectedness that remind me why I am.