Writing on a subject or title like This Life is like attempting to put the vast ocean into a tea cup… This life is so vast and so encompassing that no piece of article as the one I am embarking upon now will suffice. But I have decided that I will be taking you my reader on a walk and along the way we shall be talking about This Life!
This life can be viewed from as many angles as there are human beings on the surface of the earth. Each individual will look at life from his or her own perspective and in the end each will be deemed right because like the gangan drum, what is its front to others is its back to another. Some perceive of life as one of endless enjoyment while to some, like those born into refugee camps in Palestine, it has been hellish, and a place of endless sorrow and suffering.
But let us start with the boredom of life. Life could be so boring. It is actually boring given the repetitiveness of its daily rites and rituals. It is the same routine every day: You wake up about 5 in the morning every day, start the day with your daily morning devotion either by kneeling down in the corner of your room, read some select chapters or verses of the Holy bible most invariably the David incantations popularly called the Psalms. You may, if you embrace another faith, do your ablution and do the gestures and gesticulations as ordained by the Holy Quran in observance of the Subhuhi. Again, you mouth some incantations in Arabic and feel armed for the day against evil men and women. And for the African/Chinese/Japanese/Aborigine Indians and others who stick to their natural indigenous faiths, it is incantations galore, sometime with guttural voices.
Thereafter in continuation of the daily routine, you visit the bathroom to empty your bowels. After that you do some minor exercises before you return to the washroom for the daily bath. Before bathing, you do the mouth wash and shaving of unwanted hair in unwanted places. But for a woman, you head to the kitchen to prepare breakfast for self, husband if you are lucky to have one, and children. It is after preparing breakfast that the woman goes to the bathroom to have a wash and that may take as long as one hour in some cases. You do all of these every blessed day: so repetitive and so routine and so boring.
You send the children off to school while you now go to start your day’s work. Lunch time you have a break, munch something if you can afford it and, come closing time, you head towards home to begin another daily routine until you retire to bed; which again is another daily ritual.
Now imagine the aforementioned routines and you realise that one day is like another in terms of what you must do every day to stay alive.
Life is not all about daily chores and boredom. There is life of challenges and life of fulfilment. Life of joy and life of sorrow. Life of expectations and life of serious heart-breaking disappointments.
As I was saying, you go through life hearing so many stories from so many different people. Stories that will make you weep, and stories that will make you throw up, these are in character of the buffetings of life.
Some cultures will tell you life is a war theatre. You go through life fighting one battle or the other, winning some, losing many and in the end you end up the way you came, knowing not where you came from or where you are heading. In fact the moment the breath of life escapes through your nostrils or through your mouth and the Soul goes back to the Soul Reservoir in the Unknown, you are no longer aware. Your consciousness has returned to its Creator.
This Life to some must be lived to the fullest. To such people it is the slogan ‘Life is for the Living’ that carries the flag. And there is some sense in the axiom, because it is only the Living that is alive! Therefore life can only be for the living. And in both senses it is right: that is living of the Soul in the body and living of the Soul outside of the body. Living therefore is eternal. The body by itself constitutes no life; it is not a living entity.
What about material life as opposed to spiritual life? What about the life of science and the life of metaphysics, of the supernatural, of the unexplained and unexplainable phenomenon? The life of extreme strangeness and life of the extraordinary?
This life! What a life?
We have not talked of the super rich and the life of the most wretched poor. We are talking of life of contradictions. We look at this life and we get confused and confounded by its extremities and ask ourselves if this life is the same creation of the same Agent. You ask why a woman would be blessed with only one child, struggle all her life to see the child through school up to qualifying as a medical doctor only for the child to be murdered by armed robbers on his wedding day! This Life!
It is not unusual to find the most beautiful, most diligent, most well behaved and technically most athletic woman losing her husband to some ugly, badly behaved, loud mouthed and a character like a male crocodile. You simply shrug your shoulders and exclaim: This Life!
It is a life of paradoxes; it is a life of shocks and traumas. And yet despite all its imperfections and torments, no one wants to leave.
What may bother you, as it bothers me is why human beings are so crazy about this life when they know that it is so transient and the trappings of power, glory, and splendour are all so temporary and so fragile?
Why should any one spend a whole brief life time trying to be a hero? How many heroes are actually ever remembered? When one reads the stories and biographies of the great men and women of the past, men and women who in their time played God, or were treated as gods by their contemporaries and such characters are not even mentioned in any discourse whatsoever, one realises that it is extremely futile ‘killing’ himself/herself in rabid ambition to be a hero or heroine.
And in any case, what does one remember after leaving this planet to start another journey in the Continuum?
The Canadian former Prime Minister Jean Chretien enthused when asked whether he would be bothered by what history writes about him: ‘I will never be there to read it’ he quipped.
Professor Femi Osofisan it was who wrote in 1974 that ‘no one shall leave this life alive!!
This Life!
The pen is the tongue of the hand,the silent utterer of words for the eyes…Henry Beecher