Life’s a cycle that moves on a wheel Starting in the womb and ending in the tomb. If life were something that money can buy The rich would live and the poor would die. In his wisdom nature made it so The poor and the rich together must go.
I came across these lines while reading. They impressed me so much that I committed them to my memory several years ago. Since then, I have been wondering what is suggested or implied in this particular context. Such questions have kept popping up in my mind relentlessly.
Basically, life is the ability of people, animals and plants to breathe, grow and reproduce before they die. But according to the wise, death begins at birth. Such is the irony of life. This strange aspect of life has intrigued mankind since creation. It is very different from or rather contradictory to what is expected of it.
Life, like music, possesses its rising and falling pitches: success, in which the individual enjoys and dances to it and failures, where hopelessness prevails and makes the individual find no meaning in living; some able people modulate or change the key of the lifestyle they are engaged in and look for other options that can redeem the situation.
Pregnancy is the time when the fetus fully depends on what the womb provides for its development. After being liberated from the nine-months imprisonment in the womb, the baby that is supposedly born free but in actual sense it is in chains everywhere and every times. After birth, for some months it dwells in the extended form of life it had been living, sucking more or less the same kind of nutrients, the external form of the internal dependence and or imprisonment.
Right after that, life begins the upwards trend or crescendo, starting with babyhood via childhood to adulthood. The individual hurries to where the glaring hope of success beckons. It is a gradual transformation from low stage to a relatively higher stage that the physical and mental development offers. Such developmental ascension to the pinnacle of life is possible given the circumstances and situations are constant and consistent.
In life, there are ups and downs that seem to either thwart or abort the progress. The supposedly lucky ones, in spite of the challenges they confront, they keep going. As the old maxim puts, when the going gets tough, the tough gets going. Life is in full bloom of youth. The youth thrust past any life threatening obstacles. They aspire to reach high stations in life no matter what. Their strength sturdy, not easily damaged; their hope full, their strides, firm and fast! They stop at nothing until they achieve what they want.
With such ones, success is at their finger tip. As they pass from one age to the other to reach adulthood, they keep to their lanes that lead them straight to where they want to reach. They do not waver; they are strong and steady. Everything in life seems to be in their favor. The hay days openhandedly embrace them promising wealth and power to be at their disposal. This is the time when they make the earliest use
of opportunities. Unnecessary loss of opportunities is not condoned; they grab every good thing that comes their way.How bright and how promising the situations appear, even at this stage, life still stages challenges at that level too. No matter how man thinks he is free, there are chains everywhere. Family and social responsibilities, business endeavors and the like extremely upset the person’s life; creating a situation that is not as pleasant as he wishes it to be.
Abreast of this, the person who is not fortunate enough to be blessed with worldly goods and riches also keeps the race up the stairs of life age by age together with the fortunate ones. They both claim to live, yet while one enjoys life, the other struggles to survive even though both have reached the plateau of life. They both remain there for a while until they start moving downwards faster than when they were climbing to the alluring bright future,
At this intensive moment of crisis, the rich, with the power of their money, try do everything within their reach to get pleasure out of life. Yet, their power of performance eventually blows into thin air. The uninvited old age sneaks in unnoticed. Hopes shatter, strengths fail, ambitions fade away and desperation sneaks in displacing them all; the accumulated wealth indifferently stares at his owner. It has no interest in how his master suffers; no sharing of feelings.
Both the rich and the poor suffer the consequences equally. Death with its gnarling teeth hastens to devour their souls. It is strong for action, perfectly capable to make living beings lifeless. The cycle of life eventually reaches its finale by its unstoppable motion of the wheel of the cycle.
Many, basing on the teaching of their faith, believe the wheel of life continues in a different dimension after death. They say that death is the gate to the second phase of life that lasts forever. To belong to this phase, many forfeit pleasures of the first phase of life on earth leading the life of severe self-denial. They opt for life without pleasure here on earth as there a better one to come.
With the same impetus, others aspire to inherit the second phase of life by exercising righteousness and sanctifying themselves and at the same time without being ascetic. Both ascetic and the others have a common understanding that absolute pleasure is found in the second life even though their approaches to achieve it are slightly different. Almost all religions vehemently preach that the world to come is perfect and is open to all who make their choices while they are still in the first phase of life here on earth.
The down-wards trend is where the individual enjoys the fresh memory of the past that overshadows his blurred future. At the end, the so called wealthy man has significant death while the other hasn’t; but the fact of life is that they both end up in the tomb. Cradle and tomb; birth and death are adjacent, lying side by side.
One is the beginning while the other is the end. The beginning is the end. Free gift of life is forcibly taken away by death just like that disregarding the right of ownership. According to those who expect with pleasure the perfect life in the world to come, the deceased rests in peace until the morn of resurrection.
The Ethiopian Herald, June 2/2019
BY JOSEPH SEBOKA
