The Beauty Of Having Only One Life To Live

The beauty of life is that we have but only one life to live. This point was elucidated to me better while watching the movie Jumanji. While I did not enjoy the movie as much as I had anticipated, there was a philosophical element in it that I found quite fascinating. In the movie the stars find themselves in an open world where they each have three lives to survive through and save Jumanji from an evil villain.

What is striking is that when all of them have spent two of their lives they become more cautious. They became averse to taking risks and so choose to resign and settle. And that reminded of so many of us. People treat this notion of having one life as something that is debilitating and so most of us become afraid of losing it. We trade carefully about life, we don’t take risks, and we don’t do as we are required because we want to maintain the life we have.

The beauty of having one life should not discourage us, rather it should motivate us because now we know that we have one chance to do it.

That every action we take might be the last one. It should motivate us to put more energy in what we are doing now and also help us be more deliberate with how we are living our lives.

Death needs to remind us that we should express love the best way we should now because it might be the last, it should motivate us to laugh out loud enough to break the cloud, it should push us to do better for the society around, inspire us to prioritize on what we want death to find us doing, makes us appreciate mundane tasks like walking, dancing, basking very important.

The burden of being human is that we know that death is inevitable, but I believe the beauty of that knowledge is that it is a tool to help us shape our space in a way that no other animal can.