What is life?

Are we all alive or not? When does it start? When does it end? How can we have more of it? Can we live alone? Is life a journey? If so, what’s the destination?

Dictionary Definition
life [ līf ]
1. existence in physical world: the quality that makes living animals and plants different from dead organisms and inorganic matter.
2. living individual: a living being, especially a person, often used when referring to the number of people killed in an accident or a war
3. living things considered together: a group of living things, usually of a particular kind

Jullien’s Definition
Life is a series of moments created by our relationships.

Oftentimes we think of life in a broader scope. We say things like the average life span is 78 years old. But I like to break down life to it’s core.

If life is a number of decades.
A decade equals 10 years.
A year equals 365 days.
A day equals 24 hours.
An hour equals 60 minutes.
A minute equals 60 seconds.
A second is made up of many moments.

When we look at life from this perspective, we realize that we can only find life by being present in and to the many moments that occur throughout it. I call them millionaire moments. That’s where the richness of life lives. Life isn’t just in the big moments like births, graduations, promotions, and weddings. If we don’t enjoy the smaller (seemingly insignificant) moments that lead up to the bigger moments, the bigger moments become meaningless.

Life is a function of our relationships, not just to other human beings, but everything-people, places, things, emotions, etc. There are always many stories at play and the way we experience moments depends on our relationship to everything involved in the moment.

[quote] Life is not a journey. Life just is.
-Michael Neil of Supercoach.com.
[/quote]

Without relationship there is no life. Life, as with love, is in our interactions and inner-actions. To live is a verb and life is the byproduct. Once we are born, our relationship begins with oxygen, our mothers, and the world.

Therefore life is interdependent. It occurs at the union or intersection of two or more things-their relationship. This includes living and non-living things. For instance, when paint dries on a canvas in a certain way, it occurs differently to us than it did just sitting in the paint can. Energy went into the art-the creative energy to envision a new possibility for the paint and canvas together, the physical energy to realize that vision, and the emery of the sun to change the paint from a liquid to a dry substance.

Energy is the main ingredient of life. Beauty can be found in the moments that energies intersect in their active form (ie eating) and/or their artifact form (ie dried mango). To the extent that we can recognize all of the energy that goes into creating a moment (ie a real hug, a romantic dinner, the creation of a company), the more alive and present (our energy invested in a moment) we will be.

How many moments, and therefore how much life, are we missing?