A Life Well Worth Living

A Life Well Worth Living

1989 3 March 16 A Life Well Worth Living (280) “Everything and everyone is disappearing – Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin. What an amazing happening, and well worth recording in my diary. But that will also suddenly disappear.”

So wrote Beatrice Webb, one of the outstanding leaders of the Fabian society, in 1943, half way through the second world war.

Even in peace time, outstanding people appear on the world’s stage, show what brilliant stuff they are made of, then quickly disappear, not apparently by their own choice, but like so many puppets on a string. Some, like George Bernard Shaw and Bertrand Russell, manage to last the course much longer than others, but, sooner or later, everyone has to succumb to the inevitable. No matter how brilliant one’s career, one has ultimately to die.

The fact that human beings are continually departing this life, when there is still so much to be achieved, still so many all-time highs to be registered, seems to make no sense. It all seems pointless and unjust. Life’s very ephemerality to its utter futility and, in despair, we wonder why we have to be born at all, if after such a brief spell in this world, we are all to be snuffed out, like so many candles. It is only if we accept that there is a life after death, an eternal existence, that we see some meaning in life. It is only if we give credence to what the prophets have told us of the hereafter, that we see everything fall into place, and have no further regrets about how transient life on earth is Then, and only then does life seem to be well worth living, and not just a meaningless, mechanical series of events.