"What it means to live" by Heta

"What it means to live" by Heta - May 2017 Scholarship Essay

“The only thing that is certain is our first and last breath. The journey in between is merely a string of uncertain moments made clear through retrospection and experience.”

In a burst of inspiration, I quickly penned these two lines in my poetry journal. Although I often explore a variety of topics in my writing, the concept of death and what makes life meaningful has always puzzled and dazzled me. Therefore, it is of no surprise that the autobiographical memoir, “When Breath Becomes Air” influenced my life the most. Paul Kalanithi, the author, relays his journey of being diagnosed with terminal cancer during his last year of neurosurgery residency. Although the book revolves around Kalanithi’s approaching death, the work behaves much more as an honest, inspirational, and raw insight into how to live life. After all, life is made meaningful with death serving as the cold reminder that our time is short.

Perhaps the greatest reason why the book highly resonated with me was the unparalleled similarities between Dr. Kalanithi and I. In the beginning of the book, Kalanithi reveals how his ardent interest in the quandary of life and death drew him into the realms of philosophy, literature, and later medicine. As an individual that is interested in the same question and subjects for the same reason, it was cathartic to find the thoughts that had always plagued me to be so eloquently expressed in the book.

Kalanithi’s intellectual and vocational journey mirrored the one that I desired to pursue. Therefore, reading about the types of choices that I would have to make greatly influenced my perception on life. As Kalanithi was deciding between spending a summer conducting scientific research or at a summer camp, he eloquently pens, “If the unexamined life was not worth living, was the unlived life worth examining?” Before reading this work, I believed that it was much more important to examine life rather than to live it, recounting the multiple times I opted out of activities with my friends in order to read another work by the philosophy Nietzsche. Although it is crucial to examine life, I quickly learned that it is much more vital to revel in life. As I head out into the foreign territories of adulthood, I will have to make those decisions between studying and living. As the book reveals, attempting to study and achieve Truth is futile as each one of us is only cognizant of a smaller picture in the larger entity that is truth. Kalanithi later states, “Human knowledge is never contained in one person. It grows from the relationships we create between each other and the world, and still it is never complete.” This book further reinforced for me that it is through communication and relationships that one is able to make meaning in life.

Essentially, the book truly influenced my perspective on life and death. Most importantly, it reminded me to of course question, but to revel in the experiences that life has to offer and to to understand that although perfection is unattainable, I can constantly strive for it. With this perspective in mind, I feel truly ready to face the adult world and to forge my own meaning from the incongruous stream of moments that make up life.