My Life The Way I See It

When I left school at eighteen in 1988 after sitting my A levels, I had a dilemma. Up until then life had consisted largely of following instructions given by adults – typically parents and teachers. This didn’t really require much thinking. Now I was an adult myself, and suddenly I had a lot more freedom. Initially this seemed quite exciting. I had no strings to hold me down, and the Pinocchio analogy was to be increasingly apt as time wore on. The problem was that now I could do virtually anything I wanted I didn’t know what to do at all. If I went to university I still had to make the decision to go there. To get on in the wide world I needed to be self motivated. I needed a purpose.

You might well argue that life has lots of purposes: earn money; have fun; stay fit; make friends; have a family; dig the garden etc. This struck me as being a bit complicated to say the least, with multiple tasks competing for your attention. I needed life to be more simple. I wanted a single purpose collecting all the other sub goals under one umbrella. I looked around me at other people and also animal communities in nature programmes on TV. They all seemed to be doing something. They were all alive. But the way I saw it life had an aim – the Aim of Life. So what was this mysterious aim? I shall explore this question further in the next blog post.