In the short story ‘What Men Live By’ Leo Tolstoy has perhaps offered the best approach one should take towards life. The story goes that an angel is sent by death God to bring the soul of a lady who has died.
The angel sees the lady dead with one of her daughter still attached with her breast for milk. The other daughter has slept with tears dried up on her face. The third of the triplet child is crying. The angel’s heart melts and he returns to his Master without the soul of the young mother.
The death God tells the angel that he should not doubt the decision of the Supreme God. If He had decided someone’s death then his task was to only bring the soul. As punishment, the angel is sent on the Earth for repentance.
It was later found by the angel that the three daughters of the dead lady had grown up into young and beautiful girls.
After the death of their mother, a rich lady became the custodian of the three daughters. The three daughters were to inherit a lot of wealth from their extremely rich guardian. The angel realizes his misjudgment.
Tough and challenging times come in life to make us wiser and stronger. The way we embrace happiness so should we do when faced with an adverse situation. Testing times have their own purpose and we should better deal with them to the best of our ability instead of avoiding or escaping it.
If we look back and notice how trying times sharpened our skills and prepared us to take bigger challenges, we would only appreciate how the whole plan was laid out to make us a better person.
As against this, we would recall that when we found ourselves in a difficult situation the immediate reaction was to curse and blame everyone and everything. The reaction is quite natural but its repeat is bound to be disastrous.
After all, the purpose of life is to evolve and improve. Day after day, month after month and year after year. The idea is in complete consonance with the law of nature. Had it not been so, there would not be hormonal changes in the body and a surging desire with age to make life meaningful.
Beyond certain age, we feel the urge of being kind, compassionate and loving. Many of us, however, do not listen to this in the race to outwit and outsmart others.
The author is a journalist and aspires to become good human being by observing the people around him. He is also co-founder of TopLeadIndia.com