Lately, I’ve been thinking about the meaning of life.

Not that I’m actually trying to figure it out.  I’m not dying in a year or something like that.  And I still get stuck on crossword puzzles and such, so I’m not going to get anywhere new with this.  But I’m just considering the “meaning” of life.
 
Like the word itself:  “life”.  My best guess (since I don’t want to get up and get my Webster’s dictionary) is : anything that ain’t dead.  Second-best guess:  something that will die eventually.  Life, to me and my infinite ways, is something that ain’t dead, something that begins, and surely, ends.  The mere fact of this isn’t lost on me.  Everything that begins, ends.  Put a pencil to a paper, and that will end.  Either the line will cease to be no more,  or that lead will vanish into the fiber’s of nature’s notepad.  What about a circle, you say?  What about it?  When you draw one, you don’t spend forever circling the thing over and over again.  And when you look at a circle, it doesn’t really start anywhere.  So stop arguing with me and let me finish.

We start.  And we end.  We have no choice in the first, and we can only manipulate, minusculy, the last.  Life would suck if we don’t have control about these things.  So where do we have a say, then?  Why, in the middle, of course?    Just as when you put a pencil to a paper, you have control over how it gets to the end.  Some spend drawing a straight line from A to B, others keep drawing and drawing till they get the shape right.  Every kind of life that has been lived has a shape on a paper.  That’s what we have to play with.  You’re born, you die, out of your control.  But the middle, the creamy filling, its yours.  That’s your life.  Take it.  And don’t be quite so messy.

I’m going to cry now.  Not really.  I’m not particularly in the mood to do so, but I could.  It might be fun.  It’s out there.  It’s extreme.  I don’t draw many straight lines.  I can’t.  It’s too precise.  And my fingers make everything curvy.  I like the shapes of  the letters on this page, I think its the curves, the variations, the sheer unknown direction of the next moment that I see my life in.  That’s my meaning, of course.

And you’ll have your own.  That’s very important. Don’t take my word.  Please, don’t.  It’s mine.  You’ll have your own.  Mine is, today, about the middle.  You’ll have your own.

The point.  It’s this.  You’ll enjoy life more when you don’t think about it, and actually do it.

I miss the people I have known in my life.  The ones who mattered enough to me that I swerved my line to get closer to theirs.  The ones who drew the most fantastic things with that pencil on paper.  Just beautiful things that you can’t comprehend till you see it.  I try to get those shapes in my life.  That’s how I remember them.  And that’s how I want to life my life, too.
 
So, to cap it off: the meaning of life - Don’t be a circle.  Cause you’re not.  Get out of that loop and let your Picasso go.  Thank you, and please say hi to the pencil when you leave.