Dad, what is the meaning of life?

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

When I was about eight years old, I stuck to my father with a simple question: "Dad, what is the meaning of life?" Father: - What do you think, what is the meaning of your life? - Well … study well, obey your parents …

- This is all correct, but not for the same we gave birth to you, so that you only study well, obey us, grow up, grow old and die. If so, then there was no need to be born at all. And the meaning of a person's life is to do something that did not exist before his birth. Understand?

- How did it not exist? After all, before my birth, only me did not exist on earth … and everything else was the same.

“So you have to create something with your own hands and head during your life, even a small one, but something that did not exist before you, and then your life will take on meaning … Do you understand?

I was lost in thought, but I did not fully understand. The father was silent for a while, suddenly roused himself and began to give short orders. I, realizing that my dad was planning some dashing adventure, ran around the apartment, dragging what he asked: here is my designer and pieces of foam, a hose from the pump, a knife, scissors, wooden blocks and even my mother's nail polish.

Two hours later, my dad and I built a strange half-meter cuttlefish with propellers and even wrote my name on it. Half an hour later we were already racing somewhere on a bike, I proudly sat on the frame, carefully hugging our "cuttlefish" to me. Cold autumn lake. It was drizzling with rain, a chilly wind blowing yellow leaves through the water.

- Dad, why did we come here with this thing and why is it needed at all?

- Son, look around: autumn, cold wind, rain, everything here looks exactly the same as it did hundreds of millions of years before your birth. But now you were born and with my help, you created such a thing that did not exist anywhere: not only on earth, but in the entire universe. Pay attention: the wind blows and drives the leaves towards us through the water. This has been the case at all times, and now you put this thing on the water … lower it, lower it, don't be afraid …

I carefully put our cuttlefish in the lake, it suddenly turned around by itself, turned the propeller and swam briskly away from us, against the wind !!!

- You see: this thing is the only one in the whole universe, on which the wind blows, and it floats against it …

I stood for a long time with my mouth open. And until my eyes hurt, I gazed at the sailing catamaran with my name, “not obeying” the laws of nature, and, it seems, I understood a lot then …

Thirty-five years have passed since then. Epochs were dying away, life changed unrealistically, there appeared: the Internet, "gadgets", "widgets" and "devices", but unexpectedly, my seven-year-old son stunned me with a question: "Dad, what is the meaning of life?.."

Apparently, I’ll wait until early spring, when the ice melts on the lake, collect pieces of foam, planks, bolts, tools, my mother’s nail polish, sit with my son on the floor in the middle of the room … and no "devices" will help here. It's not easy to be a good father, but you have to … otherwise what's the point …