Live or Exist ? It is a question that we should ask ourselves every day. Post the lock down period our lives have mostly gone back to the same hustle bustle. I feel that in the busy schedule of our lives we forget to live , we only care about fulfilling our basic needs . Most of our days go in sorting things for the future and securing our future, but in this process we forget to live the moment. The ironical part is that the future that we are sorting and when that future becomes the present we are designing for the coming future. We forget that we had missed some of the precious moments of the past in order to this present. This means that we are so busy existing that we forget to live our lives to the fullest. However some people feel that materialistic things like money , fame and status are everything we need to survive and be happy. To a certain point they are something that helps us to survive and makes us feel good about ourselves but they cannot make us happy from the inside. As materialistic things have a limit. We exist for them but not live. A billionaire and a beggar are same in front of a gun waiting to shoot them.
I feel that the pandemic is a very important lesson for all of us. It made us realize the things that actually hold value for example spending time with family or reading a book quietly and enjoying the rains or maybe sitting in the car and suddenly a song plays that reminds us of a forgotten memory. We never get to do these in our everyday lives. These are the moments that we actually lived and could connect to our minds.
A poem that is similar to our everyday lives is the poem “ Dolphins” by Carol Ann Duffy. It talks about the difficult lives led by the dolphins who are captured by men in order to fulfil their parsimonious needs. They live a life where even their movement is controlled by someone else. They are captured in small aquariums where they live a claustrophobic life. The voice of the poem are a few dolphins who are talking about their miserable lives , they tell that they don’t live they just exist for the sake of it and they know that they will meet their end in the claustrophobic place.
On reading this poem I thought our lives are not miserable like the dolphins. We have an option to live but we chose to just exist. Unlike the dolphins who want to live their short life to fullest but are ceased of it. The ironical part is that we are those people who don’t let the gentle creatures live their life and neither do we live our lives to the fullest.
I think its high time that we human beings understand the importance of “live and let live” and it will be better for our world. As among all the creatures in the world we only have the power to bring a change.
