Unsolicited Thoughts on the Purpose of Life

I was thinking about life again the other day, you know, like you do. This time it was while watching "A River Runs Through It" in an apartment in Uganda. If you haven't seen this decade-old movie and still don't want it spoiled, go buy it off the discount rack and come back after watching it. For the rest of you, there are two brothers; one dies essentially of his own excess. The other lives - outlives his brother, outlives his father, outlives his wife. He lives until he is alone.

Watching the movie end with a sad, lonely old man fishing by himself I wondered whether it was better to be the brother who died or the one who lived. If life in culmination is to bear the pain of loved ones dying, to be that pain to some, to grow old and lonely and wait for the next breath not to come, then why should we live?

If there is an answer that can win this point, it occurred to me that it must be: Love. That if there is something transcendent in this world, something that lets us reach outside of this desert and play our hand in the cool current of the eternal, it is love. I can’t say why this is true, or even how I know it, except to say that I think we all know it, and always have.