What is the meaning of life, and does life have a different meaning for a plant, an animal, a human?
For flowering plants, you might think the meaning of life is to flower. But that isn’t all their life and what if, for some reason, they can’t flower? Blooming is a part of the general scheme of things for such a plant, but surely it isn’t the sole meaning of their life. The flowering period certainly isn’t all of their life.
A tree which begins life in deep ground could grow to be a hundred feet high. A tree that starts as a seed is caught between two boulders five feet off the ground may grow to be a stunted and less graceful version of a tree, but it is fulfilling the meaning of its life. It is reaching its potential. It is doing the best it can do, using the energy within it to be the best tree it can be. Circumstance may dictate the environment but the tree’s innate energy goes into growing as best it can, not into complaining that another tree has had a better start in life.
I wonder how many of us are being the best human we can be? Part of the problem, I’m sure, is that the tree has its life mapped out in front of it and there’s little choice about the where, when or why … or the how. We have so much more choice in nearly every avenue of our lives and perhaps because of the almost limitless possibilities we find it hard to channel our energy in the same focussed way that plants and animals seem to.
But that, more than any other single thing, may be what we need to do as humans to reach our potential—channel our energy in such a way that we use it for the betterment of us.
A forest makes the world a better place, but the trees don’t set out with that aim in mind. Each tree simply starts as a viable seed which transforms from one thing to another as a means of fulfilling the potential within it. A flower is necessary to bees, to its parent plant’s survival and makes us happy to gaze upon, but it doesn’t set out to do any of those things. It just IS. All good things, it seems to me, come as a result of the fulfillment of potential.
So we can relax and stop worrying if we don’t have a vision for how to change the world. We will make the world a better place if we simply put our energy into reaching our own potential as humans.
We can be rooted in one place. We can be stunted, disadvantaged and imperfect in almost every way but if we are channelling our energy into being the best human we can be, we are reaching our potential and in doing so, living the meaning of life.