Life is nature's gift to beings that makes them sentient. Yes, animals have feelings too. The thing that makes us human is our ability to think and remember. It's our ability to communicate and share our stories that makes us different. Every feeling and every action that we take from the moment we are born defines us and our life. Feelings are the fuel that drive life. It is them who take the decision. We might believe it was our brain, but we are always driven by our heart.

Love, Family, Friends, Nature, Culture, Politics and Philosophy are some variables which makes us alive. These variables embark a sense of fulfillment in our life. Even though many people don't believe in the meaning of life, deep down in all our hearts we all want our lives to be meaningful. But there always exists a big gap between our intentions and realities that block our way to see the path beyond. All living beings associate with their own kind, and people stick close to those like themselves. Then why is that we often feel that the closest ones to us are the farthest of all.? Think about it...!

In the simplest of words, devoid of feelings, one way to relate to life is by comparing it with road travel. From the starting point to your destination, there are several milestones that reveal your progress. These milestones are predefined in our society. Get a fancy educational qualification, you go one milestone ahead. Earn a lot of money, buy a house, you go two milestones ahead. Get married, have kids and provide them well, you go three milestones ahead. This is the outside perspective to life. We perceive and inspect other's life by the milestone they are at. Also, we do often become a spectator in our own life.

No one really knows who we really are. Sometimes even we are confused about who we are. The human mind is indeed unpredictable. The tendency of big decisions to make themselves is one of the biggest mysteries in our life. Are we the real writers of our life, or are we the mere readers of our life.? Ideally, we are the writers of our life but in reality we make decisions in imperfect conditions that prevent us from thinking things through. For example, the last book/movie you read/watched, the environment you were raised up in. These visible yet invisible factors affect the decisions we take in our life, thereby making us mere readers of our life rather than the writers.

In today's society, humans have access to an infinite amount of information from around the globe. We are just a click away from knowing how that villager lives his life, how a runway model always keeps traveling, what talents people have and how they make ends meet. When we know about so many people from different walks of life and what they do to live their life, that puts forth zillions of choices in front of us, in which we find ourselves lost.

Now, have you had any harm from reading a book? No right, there isn't any harm in reading a book, but the purpose of reading is to understand and to learn from the mistakes of the protagonist.

As we become habitual to watching hundreds and thousands of lives unfold in front of us through the internet, our life unfolds itself too without our acknowledgment.

If you are wise, you are wise for yourself; if you scoff, you alone will bear it. When things are going good in your life, be the reader. But when things turn out to be havoc, you have to be the writer and take charge of your life. Your book of life isn't just for yourself cause your chapter might be another page of someone else's book. So do the good you can, share the good you can. Love is a powerful factor in all our books, for example; caring for others can make you the hero in someone else's story. "To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.” This quote of Oscar Wilde has never made so much sense before as it makes now. We have to change our perspectives from that of the trees along the road to the person sitting inside the car in order to live. We need to roll the windows down, put on some rock music and feel the wind as it gently brushes past us, while we keep achieving milestones, because there is more to that journey. The destination is not where life ends. It is merely a metaphor for that moment in your life where you find the purpose of it all.

The dilemma of who we are might be ongoing, but helping someone might earn us a hero's badge which will be eternal. If you have an old photo of yourself go and have a peek of that, and think if this little guy would be proud of your toughest decisions. Cause you are the one who has to be proud of yourself! Life has taught us many lessons, to be whole, to have fun, to be sad and yes to stay confused.

A life when lived, is like a sea voyage and you are the sailor in search of land. When you embark on this journey, you have no idea on which direction to lead, but you explore and weigh your options and decide a direction to head to. Your way is filled with storms and icebergs that block you. With your mighty will, you overcome them and you reach the land. What lays ahead is a beautiful, mysterious place which was the purpose of your life.

As mentioned earlier, once in a while even we don't know who we really are but in the end, all we want is for our books to be a blockbuster with a beautiful cover of happiness. That's the book each and everyone of us try to have. After all that's the meaning of life, isn't it?

We both wrote our own views on the meaning of life. As you can see both our views differ on our thoughts, that's what life is. But there's one thing that unites us both, our work. The so-called Ikigai. We both have different contrasting opinions but our work is what binds us as one. Let's face the fact that not all of us are interested in working in a technical field. Your purpose of life might be something different, but it doesn't mean that you have to quit doing what you are currently doing, who knows you might love what you are doing a few years later. So keep doing the work even if you hate it not just for the sake of having a sense of completion but to connect these dots in the future.

Most of us have yet to find our IKIGAI (our purpose for being), and it's completely fine if we haven't found it yet. Your sea voyage might be a bit longer or Your book might be a bit bigger. But you will reach the end with a happy ending only if you control your ship or write your book. So take the responsibility, awaken yourself with nature, listen to your cores and by the end without even realising you might have found your IKIGAI