I was bored at tutoring the other day, so I read one of the articles that my student had to analyze for his paper. The article was full of statistics-- about death. One of the recurring themes was the fact that more people are now dead than alive (thank you, Captain Obvious). Stat after stat was listed without reflection. The 100,000+ that perished in one earthquake in a certain year. Several millions that perished under sadistic dictators like Pol Pot and Hitler. As my student stated with a nervous laugh, "it's actually a little bit depressing..." Where is the meaning in life in the midst of the mounting death count? What significance can one person have if we are all just a minute fraction of a percent of all the individuals that have lived up until this point?
The answer is quite simple (but I will nevertheless find a way to make it unnecessarily long) if you make one simple assumption: life does not end at physical death-- there is some sort of (endless) continuation. Mankind has been making this assumption ever since it transitioned from hunting-gathering nomadism to agricultural society. People didn't have such complex concepts as perpetual incarnation or heaven and hell, but there was this basic belief that life continued to some extent.
With that in mind, it's not difficult to see the meaning or the significance in each and every one of our lives. A common theme amongst many religions is this idea of making the next life better, either for ourselves or for others. Furthermore, more often than not, the two are intricately intertwined. In Buddhism for example, family members are more or less required to perform certain rituals and to "make merit" for their deceased predecessors. By doing good deeds, children can help favor a more positive reincarnation for their parents. In doing so, they also increase their chances of being reincarnated higher up on the ladder.
We will inevitably find ourselves as a part of another statistic. But if you throw out every seemingly "insignificant" individual from the sample, then the statistic can no longer exist. On first glance the numbers are just some cold fact that remove all meaning from human life. But of course these stats are going to be detached from us, especially when they pertain to people from another time or another place. Yet behind every single one that contributes to the whole, we can find meaning and purpose. We can't all have our names nearly immortalized in the history books, but in the lives of those near and dear to us, we can make our lives worthwhile. To them, we are not just another unnamed person that walked this earth.
Sometimes life can feel empty and the days just pass us by. Some days giving up seems like the best option. But for those of you reading this, even if we're not that close, I hope you know that even though we all are parts of some statistic, your life still has meaning and significance. No matter who you are, no matter how insignificant you might feel, or how many mistakes you've made, just know that there is someone that loves you and cares about you because in some way or other their life is better for having known you.
One of the recurring themes was the fact that more people are now dead than alive (thank you, Captain Obvious).
ReplyDeleteThis reminded me of a shirt I saw on Threadless that said "Death: our nation's number one killer" or something like that. :P
People often think of change/making a difference as something huge and monumental; it's easy to forget the little steps that made it possible in the first place. You never know how you might make someone's day. And aww, that last paragraph = <3