whyissteven:

Sitting on top of a mountain, I look out and see a grand overview of all that life encompasses in the city I live. The infrastructure, the jobs and homes and entertainment and technology. The relationships. And I wonder, what is it that we actually live for? What are the things that give us the greatest satisfaction in life?

Every generalization I have and want to make gets thrust aside. It’s just not as easy as narrowing it down to one category of thing like I want it to be. I may get just as much of a high on life from reading Mark Twain on a Friday night as you do from taking shots of tequila at your sister’s house. But the key is this—it’s those things, those experiences that give us the greatest times of our lives and that we can look back on and say “I am so freaking glad I did that,” those things where we feel alive and continue to feel alive just from the thought of them. So to say that any one thing is the key to happiness is to ignore our differences, which we can’t.

But I can say this: we’ll never know what experiences are the greatest ones for us unless we try things. Unless we’re constantly striving to experience new and wondrous things outside of what we know. How will we know that the rush of the ocean water around us brings us to life if we’re too afraid to throw ourselves in? How will we know the wonder of the world if we never go looking for anything outside of what we know? All of life is an experiment, and we are all scientists. We must live.

But to live is not good enough, because in this alone we forget about our brothers and sisters beside us. We forget that everyone else has a life that they want to live, and that their life is just as important to them as ours is to us. So we let live, as well, so that our life becomes only a blessing and never a curse to someone else. And these two things…this is it.

Live, and let live.

smr