what is life?

Once again the unanswered question – what is life? The other day I witnessed the death of a life in front of my eyes. An elderly woman breathed her last while I was in the adjacent bed attending to my own mother in the hospital. I saw her daughter wait for a sign of life in the dead soul, praying, reluctant to let go yet. When the waiting ended I heard her piercing cry, the extreme agony of losing her loved one, fulminating at the very thought of death. I was appalled and my mother silent with the thought that she too was aging. In a few minutes the mayhem was over, there was an eerie calmness in the room.

So, what is life? Is it the benediction of being alive or the perseverance of fighting it? Religious views define life as a test. We are to be judged according to our patience to uphold the callous faces of reality as life brings them upon us. We are not to recriminate our Creator whatsoever and accept his decisions complacently. But is this enough to control our livid selves? For that the Creator gave us an important solution – time. Time finally heals everything. With time we laugh, with time we cry, with time we forget. We stand on our feet after a stumble, only to live to stumble again. We were innate with such features with remnants of scars to commemorate.

So maybe I will be haunted by that day’s excruciating encounter with the departure of a valued soul from the face of the earth and maybe sooner or later I will be in the picture myself with my loved ones departing, I can only hope that time will be my incentive and allay my worries and make me strong to confront yet some more novel challenges that life brings on. Therefore the answer maybe that life is the perseverance of fighting it to relish the benediction of living it.




3rd December'08 at 8:28 am