What life has to be

Life isn’t perfect. Mine is not. Neither is yours.

But however, life can be as beautiful as our dreams. And even more. All we have to do, is to give life the chance to be so.

I mean, we all grow up with some dreams, some expectations about what life is about.

But hope never comes without its evil twin, fear.

That is, in the case I have a dream about my own life, I simultaneously do have the matching fear: that life could, in a possible world at least, not be as expected in my dream.

The fact is that our human nature is so, that the easiest way for us to survive is to follow the fear, as a warranty of excluding all risk of pain, deception, or failure.

Who doesn’t bet, doesn’t loose.

This could be the maxim of most of our lives, most of our actions, most of our surviving.

But following that maxim, I have forgotten (and I believe most of us did, for a time at least) that to survive IS NOT the same thing than to live.

I do believe that to live under the tyranny of fear is nothing but to survive.

To preserve our basics functions: breathing, eating, sleeping, working.

Even using helpful fantasies, illusions, and so on.

And I cannot imagine a world where surviving were the nec plus ultra, the final achievement of our human being.

I do agree that surviving is a necessary condition for living, but I merely doubt that it be a sufficient one.

I claim here, that living is possible. And possible for us, here, now.

Not in some fairy kingdom behind the dark clouds of death.

In this sense, I try to give an account of what life has to be in order to supervene on surviving.

Life is a special type of autonomy.

In the present thought, this means that following sightlessly our fears is nothing but surviving. Like animals do.

To live were to direct our doing according alternatively to fears or hopes or whatever comes into play in our internal process of decision making, like interests, risks, needs, opportunities, and so on.

But to choose as freely and frequently as possible what do we do.

To live were to be in command of our existence.

The ability to ask ourselves: How do I want to live?

And if possible to find an answer, or some, to that question is the sign that we actually are living, and not only surviving.

This ability means that we are conscious, aware, and rational beings.

That we are humans after all.