BRIG NASEEM AKHTAR KHAN (R)
ALTHOUGH most of us possess everything that we need for a meaningful existence, many are still found dissatisfied with their lives and looking for a purpose to live. When asked how they feel about their lives, many respond sadly while, some aggressively and even cynically, rejecting their lives being of any value. Many of these people even themselves fail to explain what they take by a meaningful life and why they term their lives being meaningless. Unfortunately, this misconception is based on their failure to recognise what does matter in their life, instead become overly focused on what they believe is missing from their life. This negativity adversely affects their approach towards every aspect of their lives, resulting into a pessimistic response to all the challenges they confront. Instead of facing the challenges boldly, they start looking for shortcut solutions and that’s where the social evils find their way into their personal character, gradually expanding into the community and if not curbed appropriately, become part of the national character.
As a result, the individuals and the communities lose their resistance power and their capacity is greatly reduced to handle difficult situations, especially, against the challenging situations created during large scale calamities/disasters or any other type of crisis. Scary reactions, lack of self-discipline, ignorance to rules and regulations, black marketing and in some cases, even the loss of human values during fight against COVID-19 outbreak and some other similar disastrous situations in the past, are apparently, some of the damaging impacts of our ignorance to the real values in life and a trend of negativity amongst the masses. The reason for the pessimistic approach towards life raises a serious question. Why people take their lives as meaningless and how can we make them understand that life is not meaningless but a very purposeful gift from God? In my opinion, our failure to recognise what really matters in life, is the basic reason for the prevailing negativity among the people. They feel purposeless because they think that they are not as accomplished as they dreamed of. They fail to understand that everyone has a purpose for living and none of us will be here if we did not have a purpose to be here. The purpose of life is to provide a guideline to make decisions, influence behaviour, shape goals, offer sense of direction and give correct meaning to everything else that is linked with our lives. People need to be educated that a meaningful life is one in which there are enough aspects of value, and a meaningless life is the one where there are none.
Unfortunately, some serious bugs in our social culture like underplaying relationships, absence of nourishing culture and lack of emotional grooming, make us hesitant to get close to one another to share and care. Lack of reliable and transparent communications, hesitation to self-examination and a disconnected academic system within the communities, have made us self-centred and isolated. Even we fail to get to know ourselves in correct perspective and identify our authentic talents. Interestingly, instead of concentrating on what matters to us, most of the time we remain conscious of what others must be thinking about us. Resultantly, most of our actions are based on presumptions rather than logic. This complicated and distressing environment has resulted into disjointed society, causing a divide in our social structure and widened gap between various segments of society. Our immunity to resist social evils, adversely affect our capabilities to stand against any crisis.
The concept of a meaningful life is very much plausible, and it comprises elements that can be clearly identified and gradually achieved. To build a more meaningful life, we need to place emphasis on emotional intelligence amongst the communities, develop a culture of introspection, ensure constructive communication systems and strive for a fair and honest system of governance at all levels. For a life to be valuable or meaningful, it needs not to be unique. We can increase or decrease the value of our lives with practice, effort, action and thought. With changing situations, meeting new people with varied experience and new ideas, our values transform and so does our sense of purpose. What makes a human life having a meaning or significance, is not merely living a life to pursue ends and goals but reflecting on why we pursue these goals, is significant. We must remember that today we live in a world that is strongly inter-connected and inter-dependent. Any event at one corner of the world has its effects visible in any other part of the world, almost instantly. Therefore, all our actions to create an atmosphere of positivity need to be taken in a broader context that caters for the impact of global inter-connectivity.
Tough situations demand a positive role from all of us to come up to the challenges at hand. We need to learn to be patient, tolerant, accept the change and live life moment to moment. We must remember that good and bad times are part of life and so are their consequences. We must learn to take on testing times boldly, with courage, motivation and self-discipline without letting the situation cause cracks in our social behaviour. How much we succeed in this, will largely depend on our ability to persevere through adversity without succumbing to the pressures. Sometimes, life is brutal, but we must remember that meaning is always derived from perseverance. The one who persists, is a person of purpose, living a purposeful life. Self-motivation and motivating others are the need of the day and it is probably the time to reframe our mindset and transform our lives.
— The writer is Security Management Professional.
