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Just how important is your life?
by
…And for that matter, just how important is anyone’s life?
ANZAC day passes and we all give ourselves a holiday. War veterans and their families get to parade and celebrate the acts of war with mixed emotions.
Yet for most war veterans, taking another person’s life (even in the sanctioned environment of war) is the source of much emotional turmoil and sleepless nights. But in a war environment, one thing is certain, your life is much more important than your enemy’s.
So how can one life be more important than another? Is one dollar coin worth more than another dollar coin? Kill an enemy in war and you are a hero. Kill a robber who threatens you family and you get a life sentence. Does that mean a robber’s life is worth more than a soldier dressed in a different uniform?
Is the life of an aspiring 20 year old worth more than that of his 90 something grandfather? And in another startling contrast, it takes more money to keep a ‘brain dead’ person alive in Australia than it takes to keep a thousand starving African kids from dying.
.. but what all these questions do is just to put a lot of fictional spin into the real worth of a life.
The fact is that a life by itself is worthless and has little importance. Imagine one whole world with only one solitary life on it…. a totally uninteresting situation.
It is when you add more lives to the world that things start to happen. A life then becomes only as important as the part that it plays. Like in a movie, the main character is the most important because take this character away and there is no movie! Where else, any other character can be killed off (written off) and the movie can keep on rolling with a different twist.
The only difference between a movie and ‘real life’ is that there are NO main characters in life. The world as we know it will keep playing with or without you. You are not that important.
But before you start feeling totally worthless, imagine that you are the 95th link on that Dura-Ace 10 speed chain on Cadel Evan’s BMC on the climb to Alp d’Huez. He will not want you to fail him – because without you, his story will just fall into a heap of excuses. Everyone has a role. Some are just more prominent that others.
So, your life (and everyone else’s) is only as important as the part that you play in this Life. No more and no less…