Exist, Experience, Elevate, Evolve

From the moment you’re born, you’re given a purpose. Your heart begins to beat, and that beat follows a path only you know how to walk. People find it so hard to search for the meaning of life, but I find it easy to see — it’s wherever we go.

We think technology is rotting our brains, and yes, that may be true. But that gives us another purpose: to evolve as humans, to move through the blockage we’re facing, and toward a healthier way of thinking.

What if the secret to evolution and longer life is a healthy mind? What if a healthy mind is the key to time and space itself? Whether you live to 37 or 90, your life begins and ends — that’s how it should be. Your life is your life. And life is long, not short.

Time takes its time. It’s a lie when people say life is fast. It depends on your mindset and what you pour your time and effort into. Spend all of it sitting at a computer, and time will drag — before you know it you’re 80, having lived one long, slow life. But if you’re someone always traveling, experiencing, meeting people, time moves quickly. Before you know it you’re 50 and have already lived many lives, with many more still ahead.

The meaning of life is simple. It’s to:

Exist. Experience. Elevate. Evolve.

Exist

To exist is one of the hardest parts of being human. Each of us has our own way of doing it — our own habits, our own quirks. Some people get bored easily. Some go deep into their own thoughts. Others have to stay constantly busy before they can sit with a single one.

You have to learn to exist. You have to learn to live alongside others while still being yourself — and that alone is a daily battle. We exist in the silences and in the loudness. How you choose to exist is up to you. It’s our mission to learn to be ourselves, fully, so that others can exist alongside us.

Exist, so that others can exist with you.

Experience

What we experience shapes our lives. It changes who we are — for better, for worse, sometimes both at once. Heartbreak, loss, accidents, joy — these are part of life, and they give it meaning on their own.

Experience shapes our behaviours, our challenges, our ways of thinking. It can move us from negative to positive, or pull us the other way. These are moments we have no choice but to face. The only alternative is to stay home and experience nothing — but that’s not the meaning of life, that’s the absence of it.

Experience to live. Experience to learn. Experience to feel. Your soul deserves it.

Elevate

Humans have never moved on a linear path. Politics, systemic issues, hierarchies, rules and regulations — there’s always something built to keep us down. But things have shifted in this lifetime. The 2000s have been part of our consciousness rising.

We have access now — to information, to ideas, to one another — and we can use it to nourish our minds and lift others as we go. That’s part of existing. That’s part of experiencing. We must always be elevating.

Experience can bring us low, but even that is part of the climb. To elevate is to lift the mood around us. To create things that invoke expression, identity, and purpose. To leave the room a little brighter than we found it through whatever means of expression.

Evolve

To evolve is to exist, to experience, and to elevate — all at once. We evolve to become better versions of ourselves, to bring forth new generations and shape the world further. It’s what humans have done across the course of time itself, and that alone is fascinating.

Evolving lets ideas grow. It lets communities expand. It opens new ways for us to exist, experience, and elevate — which is ultimately what we need to feel that our lives mean something. And that’s the hardest part of all: figuring out why we exist at all. What is existence? And why can’t we evolve the meaning of that, too?

What Is Life?

Life is our soul living in our body. Our soul — I shouldn’t have to explain — is who we are. It’s our identity, our way of moving through the world, the thing behind the decisions we make and the ones we don’t. Our soul is what drives us.

Nourish it with exist, experience, elevate, and evolve, and you’ll find that the meaning of life is whatever you choose to make of it — what you choose to think, to say, to speak into the world.

Sometimes we think, what’s the point of living at all? We joke about it in passing — don’t recommend being born — but that’s not how it works. You were born. With a heart that beats and follows a path destined for you to walk. Things are hard. Things aren’t always bright or easy. But that’s what allows us to grow, to share, to warn others, to make one less bad thing happen to someone who comes after us.

The meaning of life is simple. It’s whatever you want it to be. The meaning of life is to love and spread love, to give life, and be life, to be seen and to see, to exist in happiness, in sadness, and anger and still be fine in the end, because that’s life. It will keep going with or without you, you need to leave your mark in whatever way shape or form it is, if it’s small or big, if it affects someone or doesn’t, there’s so many of us, so many.

Exist, experience, elevate and evolve. That’s just life.