On life

2.5 Existential

1. Do you believe you are what you are due largely to the result of your choices, or do you believe you are the product of circumstances?

I feel the mystery of who I am when I read this question. Looking back is never completely accurate, and the way I see it now is that it’s a combination of things. My circumstances were profoundly important in shaping where I started: I’m a white woman, born in Australia to parents who had the privilege of family, education, health, and financial security at a time when home ownership was more accessible. They both carried complex trauma and many beliefs and patterns that were passed on to us through their nervous systems and ways of seeing the world.

However, it was my choices that shaped who I have become. Some choices were conscious, some were luck or flow, and some came from instinct or survival. The main choices that influenced me were the ones I made to grow and to learn. I had heavy mental health challenges in my 20s I was in a mental institution during my third year at uni. That was a turning point: whether to take the medication as prescribed, or to course-correct myself. I chose the latter, and that choice shaped much of who I am today

2. To what extent do you believe that unless you take death seriously, life has little meaning?

I don’t believe that life only has meaning if I take death seriously. I respect that death of the body is inevitable and can happen at any moment, but I don’t know death for myself I only know life. The next moment is a mystery, and if the next moment is unknown, then death is also unknown. What I can know is this moment and the feelings that arise in it.

I think I would hate to leave this moment I value being alive but I don’t navigate my life under the shadow of death. My nervous system naturally protects survival through instinct and fear, but meaning doesn’t come from fearing death. Meaning comes from aliveness: sensing, seeing, feeling, experiencing. Life feels meaningful because it is lived directly. The more inner work I do, the smoother and more precious that experience becomes. For me, life’s meaning is in its immediacy, not in constant awareness of dying.