Is there meaning to this life? Hindu wisdom speaks of karma and rebirth—a cycle that continues until sins from past lives are cleansed. Not exactly a thrilling revelation to shout “Eureka!” over. Christians, through confession, temporarily absolve sins in this life, promising either eternal hell or the golden gates of heaven. In Islam, as some interpret it today, one might reach the hereafter—hell or heaven, who knows?—by sacrificing oneself and others in a violent act.
I can’t subscribe to these views. Perhaps I’m a fool, but no one has returned from death to validate these theories. This brings me back to the core question: Why am I here? It feels senseless.
What difference would it make if I’d never been born? What changes when I’m gone? A deluge? Hardly. That’s a fantasy for megalomaniacs, and I’m far from one.
Can someone explain why we’re here? What sense is there in the frenzy and chaos we plunge into? The Sherpa who summited Everest on his 75th birthday clearly had a unique purpose, a distinct perspective on life.
From a tender age, we’re conditioned—indoctrinated into a conformed existence. We learn to react not with open hearts but with practised masks, hiding venality and banality. Society demands we become someone, adhere to an ideology, and profess faith in a prescribed path. Childhood conditioning carries us through adolescence into adulthood, where we master hypocritical acrobatics, becoming perfectly arboreal, as society desires. We betroth, marry, and raise children, then become the ones conditioning the next generation. The cycle persists. Meanwhile, time’s relentless tide wears us down, mentally and physically. Fatigued, we retreat behind closed doors, limbs aching from wear and tear, awaiting that final exhalation—slipping into a wooden casket, consumed by an electric crematorium’s inferno, or perhaps donated to cadaver-hungry medical schools.
Will you then ask, from your heart, “Did I make the most of my days on this earth?” Is bearing and rearing children, living a conformist life, being “goody-goody,” merely prosaic? For a mountain lover, every peak scaled, for an explorer, every frontier touched, for a biplane pilot, every cloud caressed—these are the beginning and end of life’s meaning. So, does producing children and withering away in clustered conformity, disconnected from the earth that gave us life, truly count?
1 comment:
why not? The question is whether one is content with the state of affairs. But then, there is such a hullabaloo about contentment. Is it so important to be content?
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