Before I Start

As much as I am curious about the big questions in life, the reason I'm back to blogging is for a school assignment. You see, my teacher gave us an assignment to research one of the big, philosophical questions about life, and I decided that I could keep up on it by keeping this blog. Right now the big question that I'm researching is "what is the nature of existence?". Meaning ."why are we here and what makes life worthwhile?".  I am looking at this through the work of Vincent VanGogh, but that isn't important just yet. This is about what I think NOW, before I start my official research.
I tried to have a little discussion about what the meaning of life is, but it quickly dissolved into a discussion of school and me in relation to my classmates. I guess when you have a simple answer, it doesn't seem like it's necessary to talk about the more complicated, smaller stuff, because it's there to go deeper and really about making connections that have already been made in the simple answer. The simple answer? We are all hear to know, love and serve God. That's what it all comes down to. The more complex one? The nature of existence really isn't it's own question. It's intricately connected with all these other questions, like the other two we could have picked to study- the nature of God, and the nature of Beauty. It's about the little things, and about learning Agape (greek for a specific form of love- unselfish, self-sacrificing, unconditional).
What I really find interesting though, (not that this isn't fascinating) is why people study the nature of our existence in the first place. I think that it's an attempt just to try and find our identity in a scope that we can better define, and that in a scope that we can even begin to understand. It;s less threatening. That's why I study. I figure that eventually, if I keep trying to understand life and other people, I will understand myself. I just want to figure myself out again. I can't be the first one. If I had to guess, I would say that this is probably the motivation that different people have had for studying the nature of human existence for as long as people have been studying human existence.