Everyday Canvas

Life is a Gift

Life is hard to define as we each experience it in our own special way. As mortals we wander through the chaos that other humans or we ourselves have created, hoping to find a speck of divine perfection eventually. Some of us find it earlier than others and some of us toward the end of our lives; although, a few stick with the opinion, “Life’s hard, and then, you die.”

As a child, I never questioned life or its meaning. “I exist; therefore, I am” was probably the unsung belief in my subconscious. Although my mother thought I was headstrong and my questions about her conceptions bordered on heresy, I pretty much took to heart what adults instilled in me. Granted, for some of those things, I am in their debt, but this overly strict upbringing eventually turned me into a much too serious and even gloomy adolescent, who in her late teens was a cynic about everything. By the way, in those years, reading the existentialists’ writings, Dostoyevsky and Balzac didn’t help raise my mood, either.

Luckily, my life changed through much more agreeable synchronicities while I was in my early twenties, and my worldview slowly turned from that of a pessimist to that of an optimist and, as a result, made me into a much happier person who valued her life and what it had to offer. In a way, this search for insight through my years can be summarized in a quote from Khaled Hosseini’s And the Mountains Echoed: “The cities, the roads, the countryside, the people I meet - they all begin to blur. I tell myself I am searching for something. But more and more, it feels like I am wandering, waiting for something to happen to me, something that will change everything, something that my whole life has been leading up to.”

When I look back, as to my beliefs, moral code, and the way I try to treat others, nothing has changed much, except the way I see things, how I feel inside myself, and the certitude through which am thankful for having lived and still being alive. This has been, I think, a huge transformation.

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Prompt: Write about an experience that led you to change a deep-held opinion or belief about what life is.
If you wish to generalize instead, write about some of the reasons or ways people may change their opinions and beliefs about life.