Putnam 1
Amy Putnam
Chalisse Ganzell
English 126.2754
3 March 2014
What is Life?
When you hear the word life, many abstract and meaningful ideas probably come to
mind. Life is grand and mysterious but probably not in the way you are thinking. Life can be a
hard word to grasp, but to put it shortly, life is just an intricate system of energy that functions
through biological organisms. Each of Earth’s creatures exhibits this energy and will work to
keep life going. Over time people have adopted the word life to refer to the things they do while
they are alive causing the word to become something it is not. The word life is beginning to be
misused, at least in America, and is causing people to grant themselves with an unhealthy sense
of importance.
Life comes from the Old English word lif meaning; existence, lifetime or the condition of
being a living thing. It pretty much just meant that something was alive and in existence, not
dead. This makes sense, for life is living. You have to be alive to be a part of life. Life, or lif,
referred to all things that were alive. But over the years humans have swayed the word to
represent their adventures and endeavors. Being the most intelligent and innovative animal we
must be very important to life. We are able to manipulate the world around us like nothing else.
We affect life the most so therefore we are life, we are living life. But making life a relevance of
humans has given us an illusion of superiority.
On our planet there are millions upon millions of living species. Life is so large and
exotic that it would be impossible for one person to know every component of it. There are
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countless mammals, fish, birds, insects, plants and even more on Earth and each of these
creatures uses energy to help keep the system of life going. Each organism plays a different, but
equally important role in our world. The creatures being like many small machines are doing
what they need to support the system. In this sense, the sun is the battery of life. The sun’s hot
powerful rays are absorbed by plants and then carried up the food chain to provide the rest of the
creatures with organic energy. The earth provides a stable and fertile place for life to exist while
air and water helps the internal functions of organisms. Without any one of these elements, life
could not be.
All creatures of life are important. Many may not see or even refuse to see a bug as an
important part of life, but it is. Bugs pollinate plants and decompose dead material. They clean
up our world by decomposing dead organisms and allow flowers to bloom again. After flowers
