Is our life worth just one photo?
That question was posed by a couple in their blog called “Holidays and HappilyEverAfters” that chronicled their adventures worldwide.
However, Mr Vishnu Viswanath, 29, and Ms Meenakshi Moorthy, 30, met with a tragedy last week “after falling from Taft Point - a popular overlook at the (Yosemite National Park) that does not have a railing and their bodies were recovered by park rangers last Thursday.”
Mr Viswanath’s brother “told local media in India that he believes the couple were taking a selfie when the tragedy happened. The investigation revealed so far is that the couple fell 245m in an area surrounded by step terrain and rescuers had to use a helicopter to recover the bodies”.
It is reported that “some 259 people have died worldwide in recent years while taking selfies.”
So, going back to the question - ”Is our life worth just one photo?” - I have nothing much to say about the couple because I do not know them, and God rests their soul.
But I would like to think that they were genuinely happy before the tragedy. They loved what they did and they did it with great passion, and fanfare - just look at the blog and Instagram posts of their many adventures.
They were wholehearted travel enthusiasts and their lives might be short, and cut short by an act many may find incredulous or foolish, but at least they lived it up in a way they have the most control over until that fateful fall of course.
Mind you, I am not in any way encouraging such reckless/mindless adventures, or as Ms Moorthy puts it in her post “”daredevilry” of taking pictures from dangerous locations””. But what kept me going with this post is the question that she had posted before the tragedy: “Is our life worth just one photo?”
Honestly, I really don’t know how you measure a life. By seconds? By hours? By days? By months? By years? Or maybe it is not about time passed, for nothing is worse about living when we live it just to wait for time to go by; where every second stretches to what seems like an eternity.
So, Is our life then worth anything at all?
For Ms Moorthy and her husband, life is not just about the photos taken at dangerous locations, because the still photos can never capture the depth and intensity of emotions they feel everytime they travel to a spot to take that all-consuming, gravity-defying shot. It’s what make up the journey they take together that matters, that is, the planning of it, the nights talking about it, the days leading up to it, the actual day, the days after that, and the destination, and then the cycle of passion and meaning starts all over again.
Corny or otherwise, I will risk that to say that life is an adventure. Even the worst part of our life we are going through is a tale, a story or a narration waiting to be told by us.
And have you read about an adventure that is smooth sailing all the way till the end? That kind of adventure never gets written or read because it has little or nothing to offer or fill the pages. It practically ends the moment it starts.
And life is not just one photo, obviously not, but it is many moments captured in the moving pictures of our hearts. Every challenge adds up to make life either worth living forward or dreadful going forward. It is still our choice to fill the pages with chapters going forward or end it there and then, hanging, incomplete.
Recently, my wife booked her parents’ barbecue pit and swimming pool for my daughter’s birthday, Joy. Then this week, while my wife was driving and talking to the management office (with Joy in the car), my wife was told that the pool can’t be used because it was still under servicing.
When Joy (seven years old) heard it, she broke down in tears. She literally cried with her small palms covering the whole of her small face. She kept saying: “My party is ruined. My party is ruined.”
When I heard that, when my wife told me that, I shed a tear too. My heart broke because her heart broke.
That is the price of being a father. You do not own your heart anymore. The moment you have a child, in corporate-speak, it becomes a hostile takeover where your heart is occupied by the life of your child. You do not have 100% shareholding of it anymore. She has taken over it - at most times, 99% of it. She becomes the majority shareholder. And what ruins her, ruins you.
That interconnectivity at the spirit level is at most times your greatest joy, and it can be your greatest pain.
Anyway, to cut the long story short, we managed to resolve the issue but I have learned that life is indeed worth more than a photo. It is worth more than what we do for fame, wealth and power. It is not about the mindless accumulation we are normally (by autopilot) obsessed with.
Life’s worth is ultimately about opening your heart to the heart of another. It is a risk you take to be vulnerable. It is the price of love with the sharing of your heart with the people you love. That is the only way your heart can grow and expand. And that is the only way through consistent sacrifices and love that the heart of another can grow and expand too.
The fruit of that growth is a flourishing relationship. And that relationship is the ink you need to write your story, to end it on a note that makes life worthwhile, purposeful.
For a heart given over to another selflessly is life affirming. But a heart that is kept to oneself, jealously guarded and protected, and stored in a coffin of social isolation, is a death sentence. Cheerz.
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