You are no doubt familiar with the Russian dictator Josef Stalin, who terrorized, literally, his nation for close to thirty years with his paranoic thirst for power.  Perhaps you are also aware that Stalin had children:  two sons and one daughter.  One of his sons died in a German prisoner of war camp during the War, the other a natural death sometime later.  Because her mother committed suicide when Svetlana was quite young, Svetlana basically grew up with one parent, her dictator father, living from day to day in the shadows of the Kremlin, in the center of Moscow.  Although Svetlana did not initially grasp the extent of her father's campaign of terror, as she grew older, she did, helplessly watching as some of her very closest aunts lost their lives to Stalin's paranoia.  Though she loved her father, she was horrified at the extent of his madness.  In 1967, she sought asylum in the U.S. embassy in Delhi, and eventually made her way to America, where she became a U.S. citizen and even took on an American name, Lana Peters.  She died in 2011 (her father died in 1953).
     I mention all of this because of a newly published book, which I just finished reading, about Svetlana's life.  As I now reflect on Svetlana's life, I keep returning to the enormous extent to which she had no choice in where she was born or how she was raised.  To the end of her life, and despite her intelligence, she never did really recover fully from living amidst her father's machinations.  It's tragic.
     A friend of mine once told me (and many others have used this phrase), "You play the card you're dealt" (he died at age of fifty from lung cancer).  True enough:  unless we step into the ethically tenuous territory of genetic manipulation, we cannot decide our biological starting points.  That with which we are born and that with which we grow up will always be with us.  Although we can may well be able change the way we respond to and deal with these things, we likely will never eradicate them completely from who we are.
     So we wonder what it all means, this seemingly random and unpredictable way in which we come into the world.  Can we understand it?  Does it have a point?  It really doesn't.  We enjoy our life, we enjoy our days.  But why we ever have them, we cannot say.  We die alone.
     Theists will say that this demands that we invest in the idea of a personal and omnipotent and omniscient God.  I can't argue with this.  But we cannot propose the idea of God just to make ourselves feel better.  We must rather see the idea of God as the only rational explanation for why we believe ourselves to be meaningless yet still seek meaning.  We can't have it both ways.  Even if consciousness and purpose are emergent properties, we still cannot explain, nor are we likely to, why meaning is important.
     I do not know what Svetlana was thinking as she entered death's door.  I do not know what she thought as she looked back on her life.  I do wonder, however, whether, given that with which she had deal all her life, she ever asked, why?
     Has there really been, small or larger, a point?