Please Define Life

A Journey to Search for the Meaning of Life

“ Angels dropped me down very carefully into this most wonderful field of serene, magnificent, and beautiful flowers. "I am a bee sipping all the nectar of life`s flowers.” My innocent, childish eyes imagined life to be that stunning field. I can blame my parents for providing me with a very happy childhood. Apparently, this happiness was glasses of virtual reality that rested comfortably on the bridge of my nose for a long time. On the other hand, that happiness was my wheat grains, like the ones the hard-working ant gathered under the hot sun of summer while the grasshopper was having fun in the famous tale. Those grains were my inventory for the harshly cold times that followed and maybe for the rest of my life.

Later, I was introduced, like every one of us, to a whole menu of contradictory feelings: sadness & happiness, frustration & satisfaction, fear & calmness, etc. By that time, I thought that life was always made up of contradictions.

They say war by nature intensifies everything, including emotions, especially the negative ones. I can only echo this. During the Syrian civil war, fear was huge, like a desert under a full sky of tightness with clouds of concern. I was an old traveler searching for an oasis of calm amid a wasteland. That was absolutely a bad approach, with similar chances of finding a needle in a haystack. In the war, I learned to be a boy who tried to steal happiness and the most beautiful moments from life`s clothesline in a scene from an old Italian street in an old Italian movie.

When I survived the war, I was soaked in a river of homesickness. Homesickness, when it persists, has the bitter flavor of melancholy, which is "sadness that has taken on lightness,” as Italo Calvino says. I was soaked in that river like Achilles was in the River Styx. The only part of Achilles`s body that was not touched by water was his left heel, which became a unique weak point that eventually led to his downfall. The only part of me that was not completely immersed in melancholy was my spirit. In the folds of the spirit lives hope. It is true that we can not measure the rate of precipitation of hope, but it is definitely and without any doubt the dewdrops on the petals of the spirit. A dry, cracked soul clearly informs the beholder that no cloud of hope has visited its heavenly dome.

“ When hope prevails, miracles happen” I believe that saying completely. Miracles are not necessarily a wooden box full of gold, Aladdin’s lamp, or the love of your life. A great miracle could be a couple of wise words you hear from a stranger. Those words could provoke difficult questions, give precise answers, or shed light on hidden areas that you forget or ignore.

Several years ago, on a cloudy day in November in London, a severe storm hampered air traffic completely. I needed to go back to the Netherlands. It was a hell of a job to find a train ticket on the Eurostar train going to Rotterdam.

While trying to continue reading a novel that I started a couple of days ago, a half-drunk gentleman in his sixties sitting next to me seemed interested in distracting himself for 5 hours( the duration of the trip) with a stranger.

He asked me about my life and told me a lot about his own. We discussed different topics that varied from football to politics.

Just before reaching Rotterdam, I asked him, “ What is life, sir?”

“ Are you afraid of an animal or insect?”

“ Dogs,” I said.

“ This is so weird! but anyway…Life is basically walking on a narrow path where it is impossible to go back, and then you see a monstrous dog, or you think that you see it coming towards you between the layers of white mist. You are super afraid, and you don’t know what to do!!! Actually, the road may end, and the dog may not come. Live life, and do not wait for the dog. That dog may not come to attack you, but the constant waiting for it attacks you every second and kills the joy that grows in the fields of the heart like the green ears of wheat. When the joy dies, you are truly dead. Be free on the path, not a prisoner in a cell of fears and timeless illusions. "The real nightmare is not living every moment as it should be lived.”

We reached the station, and I said goodbye to that stranger who, without knowing it through his words, was introducing me to a new way to see life.

At that moment, for one reason or another, the song “ Let it be” by The Beatles started to play in my head amid all the noisy sounds in the busy station.

“ Let it be, let it be, let it be, let it be Whisper words of wisdom, let it be, be

And when the night is cloudy, there is still a light that shines on me. ”

Subhi Najar is an Alchemist of words, Little Prince, Public Speaker, storyteller, content Creator, and war survivor.

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