Learn How to Live, and You'll Know How to Die

The search for the true meaning or purpose of life started when a person began to dream, when a person began to wonder why such things are happening, when a person search for answers. "Conquering inner space is hard and that it requires some suffering, after all, nothing worth having is easy to get," Reeve said. At the time when a man wonder, questions clearly uttered his mind, resolving some conflicts about the reality of changes, love, morality, conscience, success, and even sufferings in his life.

One of the best example are those people with illnesses who often withdraw to their life, they become too fearful and sometimes depressed to enjoy interacting with others. At the back of their mind they are different, people around their world is normal compare to them, accepting the fact that they are miserable compare to others. In 1994 at the age of 77, former sociology professor Morrie Schwartz learned he had Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), an incurable, progressively disabling, and eventually fatal disease. Another man named Christopher Reeve, a well-known Hollywood superstar who played the role of "Superman" suffered from a paralysis. These two people are probably a good example of people who embraced their illnesses, choosing to live their life as fully as possible. In each of these two people, they created reflections that will remarkably open a persons mind, heart, and body on philosophy of living.

For Schwartz, a person should live with physical limitations. When we feel everything has changed, whatever we feel were losing, we must anticipate their impact for our easier adjustments. Realization on doing things in ways that is very different from the ways we did them before. The loss of mobility is one of the best examples, that it is expected that it is going to get harder to do things the way it is before. A person with this kind of situation need to be needed even the normal ones. In fact, needs are great on emotional, psychological, and physical level of a person. It is posited by Schwartz that it makes so much more sense to be clear about our needs and realize that we need others just as they need us.

During time of hardships in our life, we must never forget that we should get to the level of reaching the acceptance to it. When things are unreachable, don't get frustrated or angry, we should let it be short-lived. "When things are really bad, you have to laugh," Reeve said. Humor can camouflage intolerance to a person whose frustration brings him down. Humor is hard but if a person gets into it, it's worth it. Many people live their life in what we call "comfort zone" or "numb zone", whether a person is ill or not, they look to others and they seem to be unhappy and still complaining about their status. As Reeve said, "Everything is relative; no one gets to corner the market of misery." When life is in misery we people tend to grieve and sometimes mourn. Schwartz in his work, tried to talk that "Grieving and mourning is a great catharsis and comfort, in a way of keeping ourselves composed." These two are natural emotions, as a person grows older, the more losses we sustain.

Therefore, we need to work out on the truth that we should grieve more and mourn more because this can help us so much easier to face the day, to face what we are going to do and it helps us being ready for whatever may happen. Our inner space, our emotions and acceptance can be our first step towards our empowerment. Our mind and body should work together for our main purpose in our life. We should know that mind and body connection can produce harmful effects in our life, and assuming that the same connection has a healing power too as well. Reeve on his work said many times "Fake it until you make it." It is helpful for a person to make a choice or set a goal in his life, then, let people know about it. Getting this started will lead to our discovery of our internal resources that could help us go further that we never thought we could. Any hope can be achieved with the power of our mind and our determination. Even sometimes with our extremely hard work we don't succeed, we should learn to control manifestation in our body with the power of our mind then we could make changes.

In making changes, still, the search for the absolute answer never stops. We should then resolve some conflicts. A person is still craving for his significance, the need to know that his level and the choice he had made mean something. This is to reassure them. How they matter the world? How they live a life that matters?

Harold Kushner a Rabbi laureate of Temple of Israel in Natick, Massachusetts in his work tried to talk about the path to a truly successful and significant life. That is through friendship, through our family, and through our acts of generosity and self-sacrifice. Kushner describe how, in affecting the life of even one person in a positive way, we make difference in a world and prove that we do in fact matter the world. A person once believes that he has the ability to do great things, that can have big consequences and people deserve to know that. But, do you have an idea of what kind of person do you want to be? Sometimes good people do things they don't believe in because they believe that the end justifies the means. People struggle on the gap between which they are and who they know they ought to be. What important is the fact that we don't stop reflecting on it. Sometimes we should be our authority of our own, we might say to ourselves, this doesn't seem right to me, even if sometimes we are sure that we are doing what is good, if it's wrong, it will be our fault. We are both good and bad, sometimes tendencies are we do charity but sometimes selfishness, we become truthful but sometimes we desire to lie. It is clear that good people will do good things because they are good. Good people do bad things because they are human. To be human we should understand that we need to be both. Above all this, we will never stop on asking, "What kind of person we want to be?"

Kushner in one of his lecture posited on the word "Shalom", a Hebrew word usually translated as "peace", the absence of quarrelling. But it is more than that. Shalom means wholeness, everything fits together, nothing is missing, nothing is broken. For us individual shalom means no fighting within ourselves, there should be no quarrelling that will divide our soul into two because our wholeness is our integrity. Sometimes a person with internal conflicts just like Schwartz and Reeve and many others comes to a point in their life that they struggle injured and exhausted. Circumstances in their life will make them too manipulative. Internal conflicts in their life ended because they are upright and they become good.

We people are so eagerly exposing ourselves to the process of searching and rejection. What do we really care about? What are the driving forces in our lives? Why there's a need to love and a need to be love? A person should be occupied or focused on things that are of his interest, importance, and concern to it. A person should remain passionately involved to it. A person is the main actor in his story. A person is a family member and a worker of his own role. We must never think of ourselves as useless. Sometimes by being ill, we tend to think that we are purposeless. We should accept the fact that when we are incapable of doing much greater things there are always other opportunities to be involved in something. We should never think that just because we are sick, we are in trouble, we have big problems we can't have goals. Everything has a purpose, work out on things and we may find that aside from being afraid and nervous, what we are doing is a source of pleasure rather than just a simple chore.

Searching accompanies, the need of a person to relate with others, this simply means that a person should keep himself, his heart open, as long as he can, as wide as he can for himself and also for others. Even a person has a need to be independent still he is dependent. A person should develop connection with the person around him. Friends, family, loved ones may share us experience at the time when our able body dysfunction. When we are sick, when we are depressed, sharing and relating past experience to our friends and family can help us and can let us feel that we are most composed and we are at peace. Reeve on his work shared his story about being a young father. One reason is that he enjoyed and loved on suggesting activities on his little children just like what he had experienced when he was a child too. But then, in an instant, the moment his head hit the hard ground everything changed. He had concluded that he could never be a good father. But, during those times of desperation on his life, his experience about being cared by the doctors who seemed like parents and the nurses who become his older brother and sister.

He realized and experienced of feeling like a child. This gave him a new perspective that everything parents say and do has a powerful effect on children, concluding that what we say and relate to others has a great influence in them. Schwartz talk about Martin Buber, a Jewish philosopher wrote a poetic book of spiritual teaching called "I and Thou" in which he tried to portray an ideal type of relationship. It is meant that people, you and I are reciprocally related but we should take in to consideration that we never lose our individuality. This makes sense for us human that we should get in touch to our inner longing, our sense, and our potential. We should discover this; achieve it, whatever it is. We should become a witness of ourselves; we should act as an observer. Experience sometimes are meaningful for us, we tend to absorbed it. When we are angry, frustrated, losing hope we must let ourselves experience it, but, also know that we can escape or detached from it. A person is actually hopeful, when we are hopeful we are courageous, we are brave in facing everything in our life. This can prove that we are internally and peacefully composed.

If this is the case, where does the value of one's life lies? What remains to a person after death? It is when we develop a spiritual connection. Everyone has his or her own way of dealing with life's fundamental questions. It is clear for us human that something powerful exists that cause our existence. That we have a connection to God and that we should open ourselves to the possibility that we are going to die. I have come up with the conclusion that the best preparation for living fully and well is to treat the day as if it is the last. It can make ourselves clear about our main purpose. In the end what matters most is; not what we bought but what we built, not what we've got but what we have shared, not our success but our significance, not what we've learned but what we've thought, not our competence but our character, not how long we'll be remembered but by whom and for what.