Survival!

When we are born, we do not know how long are we going to live, but we do get a sense which guides us towards survival. Survival is the basest of the emotions or thoughts which always is the most important aspect for us. Today, while returning from office I saw a burning car on the road and the first thing that I uttered was "Oh God! I hope no one died in that car". Consciously or sub-consciously each of us are working towards survival. Belonging to a class of Homo sapiens, one of our characteristics is that we are social animals. As we grow old, we tend to form deeper bonds with other humans around us whom we call family, friends and relatives. These bonds are also important for survival. Imagine how scary would it be to live all alone on this planet. So, survival has different meanings for different people. For a dying man, survival would be one more breath and for a healthy person, it would be having his/ her loved ones around.

During the course of living we get attached and detached from many people. There are times when we feel low because of the tragic events like illness or death. These are the times when we need to think the reason why we feel that way. What we are doing to ourselves by feeling that way. When illness or death around saddens us, one logical thing would be to respect our life and own health as that’s what is causing all the pain in someone else’s body. The person for whom we feel bad would have certainly wanted us to be concerned and caring in the time of need but would have never wanted us to suffer. If only we could FEEL logically, world would have been a different place! It is a strange fact of life that though we are born alone and we will die alone, life is no solo stunt. In the course of living, we invariably affect and get affected by others around us and memory makes it worse for us. Survival becomes difficult when someone close to our heart gets stroked off. But, does that mean we stop living and loving our life! Imagine all that person wanted was to survive. And we having that opportunity forget how beautiful the gift of life is. When an unborn is conceived, it’s just few cells which slowly become a complete individual. How beautiful the creation of God is to give life and more importantly a beautiful soul to these cells.

Life is a wonderful gift which has been bestowed upon us and certainly survival is the supreme thing for us. We never opted to be who we are and how we came into existence, but we can certainly decide and work on what we want to become. Each day when we wake up, we have two choices either to chase our dreams or to go back to dreams; obviously wise people choose the former one. As the history tells us, it has always been about survival of the fittest, but the definition of being fit changes with time. We are living in a fast paced, well connected world, where what may come in the next moment is unknown. And it is this unknown which will judge how well prepared are we to survive.