Chapter 11 - The Meaning of Life, its Purpose & Your Inner Artist

I've always been sufficiently bothered by the big questions in life and still my voracious curiosity for life remains insatiable. The French Philosopher, Henri Bergson, convinced people that immediate experience and intuition were as essential as rational and scientific thinking for making sense of our reality. Just the other day, I came across one of his quotes that reads: "We are free when our acts proceed from our entire personality, when they express it, when they exhibit that indefinable resemblance to it which we find occasionally between the artist and his work." And I was reminded of how each one of us has the innate desire to become whoever we want to but are perhaps confined by "socially-accepted" norms and behaviour, held back by commitments in life or thrown into other circumstances which require us more urgently. Everyone is an artist, whether aesthetically, mathematically or linguistically. One is an artist of numbers, of words, of pictures, of music, of so many different forms and fashions. Artists are not just painters, not just fashion designers or sculptors or dancers or photographers. Artists are essentially, "who we are in the freest sense".  Someone once said, the artist is not a different kind of person but every person is a different kind of artist. People aren't weird, they're just different. The only way forward for life to flourish is to accept the diversity of it, of nature, of cultures, of colours, of people, of thoughts. The meaning of life, you ask me? It is to find your gift. And the purpose of life? It is to give it away. Find your gift, make a conscious effort to discover your inner artist.