One Question - Why am I here?

By: Daniel E. Kramer

If there is a God, and if I ever were to meet him, I would have one simple and direct question; Why am I here?  It seems appropriate on this day, the day of my 36th birthday to ask this question, and it was last night that it popped into my head as I laid next to my wife. At 1:30 in the morning, as I stretched out in bed reflecting on my life, awake, sleepless and yet comfortable, I realized that I would like to know this answer. Knowing now that I will never truly know this answer is not a problem though.  I do not think it would affect my life in any real way, in any case.

Let’s just suppose for a minute that there is a God, a being that made everything, and one that would even be interested in answering the question if posed.  First and foremost, I believe that I would not be able to understand the answer upon receipt.  God-logic is something that in all likelihood would be far above my pay grade. However, If I were to find out that am I here for some purpose, I am not all too certain that I would choose move in that direction, thenceforth. My life has been full of responses to authority that are less than conformable or with intent to obey.

To be completely honest, it is the opposite that I would most likely move towards, but I would suppose that a god all-knowing would know this about me in advance. Perhaps in a step of God like genius, the reason for my being would be stated to me opposite of what the reason really was. Maybe it would be given just to allow for me to rebel, and in rebelling allow for me to conform to the greater desires of my God; a show of purpose via the Zen master’s approach.

This is what I was up to in the waking hours of the night.

I now have 36 years under my belt, and I must say that I am happy to live in a time where we can have an abundance of thought provoking conversation and thought, albeit in the middle of the dark and quiet night, when almost alone, nearly asleep, in an absurdly tired mode. Lucky are we the people who get to live and breathe the air of freedom of thought. 

So what have I learned over the years? I have always been given the opportunity to succeed, and I am grateful for this. But it is the opportunities squandered and lost that have taught me the most. Thank God (or the creators of this simulated reality) for bad decisions and mistakes, for short-sided thinking, and self-centered thoughts. It is in these that I feel most grateful.

Let me explain.

If it were not for my poor choices, my bad habits, and my lack of wisdom (especially early on in life), I would not be whom I am, and I would not have what I have today. I would not have met my wife, had my children, started our businesses, or traveled the world to see other cultures. I would not have my friends, family, pets or purpose in writing this. Putting my foot in my mouth has taught me far more than getting it right the rest of the time.

In eating too much, I learned the consequences. In drinking too much, I learned the road to nowhere. In my obsessive and self-serving ways, I learned how to be better.  Thankfully, not all people have to do this. Fortunately, many (or even most) are born with the ability to walk into the world with calm and quite minds and spirits, ready to do good at all times, be perfect always, and never make mistakes 😊. For me though, it was the former that has now led to the latter.

This is the gift of time, the gift of multiple days on this earth, the gift of 36 years thus far attained. I have another today to embrace and learn from. I have one more day to try to be better, try to do better, eat better, live better, and continue failing at all of the above on a regular basis. It is here in this moment of failure of “doing as intended” that I build me up little by little.

I used to feel like I was confident, knew my beliefs, was certain in rights and wrongs, held less respect for the gray area, held more respect for the realistic ways of the world. I used to think that things were cut and dry, doing good meant to getting good and doing bad meant to getting bad. How wrong I was, all at the same time as I was right. My perspective has changed, and certainly to add another decade will change it more, until enough decades pass that I will hopefully be lucky enough to begin to forget the lessons I learned along the way.

So God above, here is to the question of why I am. Here is to the birthday that allows me to think on my being. Here is to the world, let it be complicated so that we may have something to work on, and here is to the life lessons, the failures, and the mistakes that have made me whom I am.