What do you live for?
What would you die for?
What would kill for?
What would you die for?
What would kill for?
The answers to these questions can be guilelessly simple…and incredibly complicated. We can answer with broad generalities…I live for love, I would die for my country, I would kill to stop war…or with utterly personal truths…I live to make my lover happy, I would die to save my child’s life, I would kill only in self-defense…and none of our replies would be “wrong”.
The people on the program had a wide array of responses…from nervous jokes to plain-spoken, heartfelt sincerity…and, of course, it made stop and think how I would respond.
What do I live for?
I live to love and be loved by those in the close circles of family and friendship I belong to (and to make some kind of positive impact, however small, on their lives.) I live to learn…life is, ultimately, about learning from its very beginning to its very end. I live to be as happy as I can be. I live to write because that is what I’m called to do. I live to be of positive value, however small, to those I encounter in this life.
What would I die for?
I would die to save the lives of those closest to my heart and soul (it is, if I’m being perfectly honest, not as long a list as I might intellectually hope it might be…about 12 people whom I’m relatively sure I would take a bullet for without hesitation; another dozen or so I MIGHT do so for with varying degrees of hesitation.)
Despite my mother’s objections, I was willing to go to Vietnam (and fight and possibly die) when I was younger (that war ended before I reached the age of majority) and I’d like to think that I would still be willing to die for my country and I would willing to die rather than lose the freedom my forebears endured chains of slavery for, fought for, and died for. I won’t know for sure about these until it becomes a real choice I need to make.
What would I kill for?
The glib, off the cuff answer is that I would not kill for anything…but that’s not true (however much I might want it to be.) I would not ever want to kill but, that said, I know that I would very probably kill someone trying to kill somebody I loved…and I would kill if that was the only way to stop someone from killing me.
Three simple, complicated, thought-provoking, belief-challenging questions:
What do you live for?
What would you die for?
What would kill for?
What would you die for?
What would kill for?
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