This whole search began for me when I was 12, and I was going to a different school, so I felt this need to be enlightened and therefore I will be accepted. Not true. I soon found out that your peers really don’t accept you for knowledge, its more geared at looks and social skills. That scratched my first theory, which had been our purpose was to be educated and grow mentally ingenius. But then I thought long and hard about that, and I came up with these steps: 1) you become educated and brilliant, for what? 2) so that you can get into a great college, why? 3) so you can get an incredible job, for? 4) Money. And so I then came up with the conclusion that the meaning of life was hidden in piles of money and fancy clothes. Wrong Again. I found special clothes can’t make you happy, nor can expensive dinners or the richest friends. My enlightentment process seemed to be slowing down as I got more frustrated along the way.

All of my search up to then was mental, I decided to get into the now, focus on the world around me and maybe the answer will just fall into my lap. You can tell I’d started to laze around the subject, it seemed so easy, but now it was so hard. Whenever I went to the bookstore, I sat down in the spiritual/new Age section flipping through page after page of books about Witchcraft, and astrology. Then, 3 books caught my eye, “The Tao of Pooh,” “the Te of Piglet,” by Benjamin Hoff, and “Pooh and the Philosophers,” by John Tyerman Williams. I’m a pooh fan, and usually I can relate anything thats going on in my life to him, so when I saw these I thought I was sure to find the answer to my bugging question. I bought all 3 and spent a week flipping through the pages, to discover only that I now know how the bear of very little brain thinks, and nothing more about myself or place in the world. So the next time I go to the bookstore, I check out this book on birthdays, I turn to May 14 (my birthday), and discover many things about myself.... I found my weaknesses, and my strengths, well supposedly. I was satisfied, for the time at least. But then I had an epiphany and I realized that I had become those weaknesses and strengths, they weren’t me, but I had made myself that way, and now my search for the meaning of life had become even more confusing and frustrating!!

I needed a new theory, something to busy my brain with for a while. I couldn’t seem to come up with an answer, so I lit a few candles around me, turned off the lights, and burned some incense. I felt so incredibly spiritual and down to earth, or was it the opposite. I really dont know, but then I decided that the meaning of life would be found in meditation. I mean, almost every form of religion had meditation, and they all had seemed to figure out the meaning of life (by the way, I’m non-religious, which made this seem even worse.). I pranced on back to the bookstore and got another book, this time on meditation. It gave simple instructions like how to meditate, and then it gave you prayers to recite during the meditation, this all proved to be much to much work for me, considering youhad to memorize all the prayers because you weren’t allowed to open your eyes during the process of meditation. So I went back to the candles and the insence and thought more.

I came up with this system of figuring out the meaning of life (individually that is), and you ask yourself/do these questions/steps: 1) Who are you? 2) Why are you, you? and 3) What makes you the happiest? They were fairly simple questions, but I spent over 3 weeks thinking over the answers to them. And the answers astonished me (the answers I gave were): 1) I’m a girl, a small ant in the earth that seems to be covered by colonies of other ants, and sometimes never seen or heard. But then sometimes I rise above the other ants in the colonies and I do something different. I’m someone who wants to take on the world and have a fight to the death and win, even though I know the world is powerful. I’m someone that wants everyone else to be happy, and someone who feels sad when others aren’t. -My answer was really much longer than this, but it dragged on and on, and I felt to egotistical and hurt at the same time reading it.- 2) I’m me because I want to be, and because I don’t want to be anything else. But at the same time, I’m not who I want to be, but more like who I want to become, but at times that to can change and I can be the total opposite. I’m me because sometimes it seems like my goal in life is to make the world happy, but then when I don’t succeed I get frustrated and try to change, but when I try to change, I only fall back into what I used to be. 3) This was the hardest question, and finally I found my answer, which proved to be my meaning of life (well, at the time at least..) I’m only happiest when everyone else is, especially my riends, it seems like no one can have fun when someoen else can’t. It seems so simple, but really when you go into it it’s incredibly complex. Those 3 answers helped me realize myself, and my meaning of life, but only for the time. You can never tell, people change every day, and I’ve changed an emense amount from when I was in 6th grade coming to a new school. It’s been 3 years since my quest for the meaning of life has been started, and I have yet to find an answer, but I’ve found myself, and that can play the most important part in the search for a world truth.

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