Feature

A man's worth

Zahidul Naim Zakaria

How would you judge a man's worth? Would you judge him by what he has made of himself in his lifetime or by his academic and professional accomplishments? Or, does his value lie in how his loved ones remember him, how they cherish his memory? A man can do every single thing correctly but still feel like a failure. He can take all the steps, make all the right decisions but still he cannot avoid the unlimited uncertainties of life. Life is too open-ended to be a series of predictable events. Chances are that he will fail to solve the equations that life places before him; one lifetime may not be enough.

So what's the use of going through all the trouble of living, if in the end, too many overpowering elements restrain us from reaching one ultimate goal? The world around us simply does not allow our ambition of cosmic proportions to be fulfilled. What's the way to a happy death? Must we all remain frustrated and keep trying till the last breath escapes our system? People eventually will die. They will cease to exist. Even if they are lucky enough to avoid getting hit by traffic or becoming an unlucky victim of a crime, they will still pass away naturally. At one point or another, a man's cardiac muscle will miss a beat or two and eventually stop beating. Or maybe his neurological impulses will become disoriented by a sudden loss of blood flow to the brain, paralyzing him until the moment comes when the rest of his body cannot take it anymore. At a certain age one of so many different forms of cerebrovascular disorders will get to him. After his death people will attend his funeral; they will shed tears. They will lament until the point comes where they have to push his thoughts out of their daily lives and move on in order to get on with their own lives. So what was his life worth? All he gets are some manifestations of surface tension. How many people ever looked deep enough to understand what he lived for? What were his sources of happiness, what were his unfulfilled dreams?

We hang on to the belief of life after death blindly because we need to. Without it life on earth seems meaningless. Life after death is an enigmatic reality that we know for a fact cannot be proven. Maybe the only thing the future holds is nothingness. Maybe there is no final judgement over our sins and virtues or any heaven or hell. All these thoughts lie at the back of our subconscious mind. We constantly fail to take account of these paradoxes so we do not lose focus over the sane and rational way of doing things. We cannot make life meaningful by always looking at the half-full part of the glass and by avoiding the questions that haunt us and drive our sleep away. We have to embrace the fact that life cannot be too rigidly planned out. Our way of living is bound to reflect the mess we find ourselves in. Life can be purposeful this way because what happens after death is not important. The most unimportant events of a man's life are his birth and his death. What is important is the time he has been given in between and what he has done with it.

Life can be worth living without it being a big extravaganza. What a man's life is made of depends on the checkpoints. What define his worth are his first steps, the times he cried tears of joy, the moment he knew that he had fallen in love, the time he learnt to share his love and truly understand what a big responsibility loving someone is, the phase when he decided to raise a family of his own, when he decided to become a father, every time someone told him how important he was, every time he made a difference in someone's life, and basically every time he felt the slightest agony and heartache. His death is just one moment in an ocean of time it is insignificant. People fail to acknowledge the more significant milestones the way he lived his life.

The worth of a man lies not in the few days of tears after his death but in the years of joy and happiness he has brought to the world around him during his lifetime.

East-West University