It’s been said that there are some things that are more true than others. For instance, it would be true to state that I am alive. I know this to be true because I can feel my blood pulsing throughout my body, being pumped out from a cardiac muscle at the center of my chest. However, this will not be the case forever; surely my heart will not beat eternally. It’s interesting how I started out using my physiology in order to determine whether or not I am alive. Because who’s to say we cannot still be alive even after our bodies make their final descent back down into the Earth, as the planet reclaims the body it created long ago. Is it wrong to say that I could still be alive if my body is not? We hear wild fantasies of people switching brains with another, swapping bodies if you will. If your original body dies, but the brain lives in another, would one still be alive? Our cells replace one another incessantly. We in no way have the same body we had, say, 10 years ago. Yet we still consider ourselves to be alive, and the same living person at that. It is now easy to conclude that it is our brain that gives us individuality and the sense of being alive, but what feature of the brain keeps us as alive as we can be? Are we still ourselves if we’ve forgotten all we once known? Surely people lose some of their memory and recollection at some point in their lives, but if all our memories are gone, are we still alive? It’s easy to say yes, because a person cannot simply argue you are no longer alive if you’re standing right there in front of them. You just don’t remember the you you once were. This is a classic example of the fine line between what differentiates us from others, because we can still be ourselves even if we’ve lost our memories of the past. We’d still have the same tendencies, the same attractions, the same impulses. It is because of this that I propose the first truth of life to be that we are alive as long as our values, our ideas, our beliefs are still alive. Because, while they certainly can and will change if one loses their memory, they are the core of ourselves and are not as easily replaced as our cells are year on end. If our ideas live, we live along with them. Because we never really are anything without our desires, our philosophies. We are simply housing units for beliefs that will penetrate through the depths of time. Martin Luther King Jr lives on in our lives because his ideas live on. Who’s to say this is not true for all?

We consider it normal to be alive without realizing that the generations which carried on the tradition of producing a child have all died, and are the reason why we can move our fingers to type a paper, or use our minds to read it. However, the second truth Is that we rely on others to help define ourselves. A person can be a student, a child, a leader, a lover. All of these are merely defined by our position in society and our relations with other people. We are alive, and we know this to be true because some day, some time someone will pick up their pencil and write about those who came before them: us. We carry on the chain of current tenants of the Earth until it is our time to move out, and our surrounding tenants help us shape our lives into what they turn out to be.

If we are alive, and our lives are determined by those who are the closest and farthest away, we must then delve into how this relationship has affected us in the past and how this can determine our future. For the most part, everyone we encounter is alive, and in some way, shape, or form, our mere presence has the capability of altering their state, for better or worse. There is no individual whose existence went to waste; rather, they make minute alterations to the world, which have thoroughly shaped our lives as they are known today. This tower of cards continues to grow taller as we each place down our foundation for those at a later date. If one card is taken away, the whole structure falls apart. The reason for this is simple: we all interact with one another due to the fact that we are all alive, so in a way we are all connected. This is not limited to those who are still alive, however, for we all come from somewhere. Therefore, we are all linked and altering each other’s lives every day, creating the history that is distanced from those far in the future.

I am alive, you are alive. We live on insofar as our ideas live on, our existence is regulated by our interactions with other people, and this irrevocably determines the interactions of the people yet to come. These are the three truths of life.