We spend our lives living. We live with everything we live with. We live with happiness and sadness. Peace and anger. Full belly and empty. Satisfaction and hunger. Joy and suffering. Ease and dis-ease. Health and pain. You fill in the dichotomies.  You know the life and experiences you live with. Your life is your life: each person's life is their own. Our lives are unique expressions of what it means to be alive. And not. Every life is life. We are all connected, living the same joy, pain, hunger, fear, happiness. 

The question is, "Why?" Why are we here? Why does it feel so good at times and so bad at times?

Perhaps the answer is, "so that we know we are alive."  When we are happy, we enjoy being alive. When we are miserable, we might not like being alive. It's so easy to forget that both are "alive." Without life, there is no happiness or suffering. Without life there is only death.

What about God? By and large the people who believe in some version of God, Gods and Goddesses have an idea that the end of life is to join in union with God. 

We "come to life" from God. We join God at the end of life. Does that mean we are "joining" God because we were not in union before? Dis-jointed. Did we leave that union, disjoint, when we came to life? Do we "rejoin" in the end? Aren't we already "One with God?"

Bingo. That is the paradox. The great cosmic joke. That to be alive is to be disjointed from God. That the way to join God is to reach the end of life.

And then there are the "enlightened" ones who demonstrate union while still alive; Buddha, Jesus, Mohamed, The Dali Lama, Mother Teresa, [....name your favorite bodhi....].