I don’t think life comes with a built-in meaning.
If it did, we’d spend our days trying to get it right.
Like we’re being graded.
Like we’re always late to the “correct” life.
But life doesn’t hand out an answer key.
It just happens.
Sometimes it feels like you’re being gently pushed into it.
Into sunlight.
Into wind.
Into emotions you didn’t ask for but still have to carry.
Birth and death feel less like a celebration and a conclusion,
and more like two edges of the same page.
Between them is the part we call living.
Unstable. Unfinished. Always changing.
That’s why I keep returning to one simple idea:
The present moment is the only place where life is real.
The past is something we can only narrate.
The future is something we can only imagine.
But breathing, choosing, acting, and taking responsibility
that happens now.
If meaning exists at all,
it doesn’t live in “someday.”
It lives in small, concrete moments:
the breath you notice,
the pause before you speak,
the step you take when you don’t feel ready.
There’s another reason the present matters.
We’re always postponing life.
We tell ourselves it will begin when our body feels better.
When we have more time.
When our relationships stop being complicated.
When tomorrow finally arrives.
And then tomorrow arrives,
becomes today,
and gets dismissed again.
It’s a quiet habit:
exiling meaning to the next version of life.
I’ve seen how cruel that habit can be especially when the body changes.
When someone loses a freedom, they mourn it.
When they lose another, the earlier loss suddenly looks gentle.
And when the next illness comes, even that gentleness becomes something to miss.
It’s not just tragedy.
It’s perspective.
It’s the way life keeps reminding us:
there is always a “worse,”
so the “not so bad” deserves more attention than we give it.
Impermanence isn’t a pessimistic idea.
It’s a practical one.
Everything changes.
Joy changes. Pain changes. Love changes.
Bodies change. The world changes.
Clinging to one state, one version of “how it should be”—
is like trying to hold water in your fist.
The tighter you squeeze,
the less you have.
Accepting change doesn’t mean giving up.
It means returning to what you can actually do:
this minute,
this conversation,
this choice.
Some people call life absurd:
the world is quiet, and we keep demanding an explanation.
Maybe that’s true.
But I’ve never found meaning in an explanation anyway.
I find it in showing up.
In doing the thing even when it doesn’t come with a guarantee.
In caring without a certificate.
In continuing without a final answer.
Not because I believe life will reward me with meaning later
but because this is what it means, to be alive right now.
So I try not to wait for the “better version” of life.
Not when I’m healthier.
Not when everything is smoother.
Not when I finally feel qualified.
Today is enough to begin.
Now is the only place it can happen.
Steady this breath.
Place this step.