The arithmetic of life

Ever wondered what life is all about? All of us, sometimes do ponder about the true meaning of life and more often than not, return a null search result. Few are the blessed souls (or so we think) who are sure about the purpose of their birth and are also successful in pursuing this purpose. 

I keep going through this thought process and time and again have drawn the same blank as a reply. But in recent times I have been trying to write up a formula describing life.

I am not saying that the truth of life or definition of life can be so simplistic as to hold it within the bounds of expressed words. No, the truth is that life is so abstract, so vast that it will break open the seams of any such container trying to define its bounds.

But to make for an interesting read, I attempted to contain this limitless word within the walls of an expression and here it goes:

Sum(t1(Forming a cocoon) + t2(Growing inside the cocoon) +t3(breaking free from the cocoon))

where sum --->age 0 to lifespan of a person

and t1, t2 and t3 are the time coefficients of the associated activity.

Let me explain the formula.

I feel that from the time we are born to the time that we die, we are constantly evolving. This evolution of a personality happens in stages and life itself is a sum total of all these stages. Each stage is very similar in nature to the preceding stage.

Put in very simplistic terms, each phase can be described as the total of time taken to form a cocoon around us + the time taken to grow to a certain stage + the time taken for the struggle to break free from the cocoon, only to repeat the process of forming a cocoon once again.

Though finite in nature for each person this process continues infinitely in nature. The number of such iterations depend not only on the life expectancy of the particular species, it also depends on the time taken for each iteration and may differ even with a particular species.

Though this attempt may seem futile at explaining life per se, it has brought out one interesting feature of life. Life is going to be a constant struggle. Some of us stop at stage 2, i.e. growing to a certain level within the cocoon and remaining there peacefully, while some of us struggle to break free from the cocoon. Once we break free from the cocoon that we are in, we struggle even further not knowing where to go. Then we start making a new cocoon. Whether the struggle is the purpose or we struggle to find the purpose will remain a mystery. A very intriguing one at that!