What IS life?
Some might say life is hard. Proceeded with reasonings & evidence of why.
Others might say life is a blessing. Carrying on with expressions of awe & gratitude for but a few of its vast spectrum of fascinatingly beautiful experiences offered within it.
Some might compare it to a hell, focusing on all the pain & struggles it often comes with.
Others may contend it can be a “heaven on earth,” sometimes containing profound miracles and gifts.
Some might insist it’s a “tragic comedy.”
Others, a “Divine comedy.”
Who’s right? Who’s wrong?
How such a drastic contrast of differing/opposed answers?
Certainly, it may sometimes come down to a matter of belief. Whether instilled by others or cultivated through experience shaping perceptions. And once in place, beliefs can and often do become “self-fulfilling prophecies.”
At other times, beliefs - the way many think of them - may be less relevant than many insist. Perhaps sometimes, some souls are fated/destined for certain experiences, irregardless of belief.
Sometimes we might/do have the “free will” to “make of life” what we want/choose. Sometimes not.
Maybe sometimes we do cause our own suffering, banging our heads against the wall, locked into the “negative/pessimistic” perspectives on/of life while it could be far smoother, easier and more graceful as embracing the “positive/optimistic” side.
Maybe sometimes the harder, more difficult & challenges experiences are necessary and part of the package, essential for soul growth and learning that can only come through them.
Maybe life isn’t always so black-and-white as the oversimplified initial answers to our opening question would suggest.
Maybe life seems “hard” at times because we don’t laugh, dance, and play enough.
Maybe in spite of all the laughter, dance, and play we could do, it’d still never be an escape from or means of completely negating the “harder” aspects of human life.
Maybe “ignorance is bliss,” and those who see life through the rose-colored lenses are blessed.
Maybe the wisdom that eventually comes as facing the shadowier sides of human life head-on becomes a blessing of its own, different nature .
Maybe there is no absolute answer to the question of what life is, for any possible ones be default arise from a subjective, narrow-focus that don’t speak to the Truth of the totality of human experience, let alone the diversity of how it unfolds for billions of different individuals.
Maybe the process of looking for and stating an answer is but collapsing the quantum wave of possibilities into a single particle - that answer no more “true” than its complete opposite, and/or any other “answer” existing within (and without) of the entire spectrum in between.
Maybe life is the canvas upon which we co-create the experience through collapsing down those possibilities into one (particle state) to experience, while others collapse/create others.
Maybe life is the ride of observing the diversity of all those possibilities unfold - some through ourselves, the rest through others & all life’s vastness of evolution over time.
Maybe its both.
Maybe that’s still but one creative interpretation… and none of us know near as much as we think that’d even begin to qualify us to accurately comprehend, let alone answer, the question of what life is…
I think life is everything you mentioned here and more. It's more complex than we can define or imagine physically, mentally, and spiritually.
Stunning.