Leave the question open

If you were to ask, "what is the meaning of this life on earth". I suppose you would get as many answers as the people you asked. If the person was religious it would be to serve god by following as closely as you could his word from the bible. If you were agnostic or an atheist you would be less formal, more open to be representative of the many factors which make us as diverse as we are.
Of course the meaning we attach to life is dependent on our age, our health, our maturity, our economic position, so many factors that when we ask the question it clearly has no one answer. And yet life I s so precious and it's remarkable that we don't step back and at least consider our time on earth and the use we make of it.
We are usually frivolous with our time if the time is not directed by others, people we might work for or who have the power to make us do things which we normally wouldn't.
Should we be hedonistic and only do the things we ourselves want to do or should we throw ourselves into working for others and merging ourselves and our time by standing on a street corner rattling a tin. It's said 'the good we do others is repaid many times over' and therefore the more we expose our-self to say charity fundraising, then the intrinsic return should run deep.
Many people though would find spending their hours in this way a waste of "their" time and would rather be out playing sport or watching sport, weaving baskets or painting landscapes. The time spent thus has its rewards in the contentment people receive but is this contentment not simply not another way of avoiding the question, of how to spend the time we have.
If we were as conscious from the start of the total package available it would probably make most people paranoid, imagine having to account for your time, useful time and less than useful time but of course, we haven't defined what useful means yet.
If your eye is on the rewards of heaven then you have an unfair advantage over the person who sees his time on earth as finite. If you are spending your time searching for answers and practising what you believe is a correct way to live life productively, gaining an insight into the profundity of death and the life cycle, then right up until the last second you are immersed in a question which only you will know the answer to, the second after.
Given that most people hardly ever think about the meaning of life, then their immersion in the stimulus of drugs, sex and rock and roll is not only predictable but worthy. At least their nirvana is here on earth and not a complex belief of an after life. At least, when they shrivel away with kidney failure they can pinpoint to their dilemma even before they go.
"The hope that passes all understanding" might turn out to be a mental aberration dreamt up as a cry for redemption, but a redemption from this life. It's the only one we are likely to know and seems a poor return for two thousand years of civilisation.