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Published: October 19th 2010
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Salam! Izayak? Hamdulah Habibi! I have travelled southwards along the Nile of Egypt! I'm enthralled by all the amazing history that the ancient Egyptians left behind. The temples they constructed are so beautiful and it's incredible that it survived over 4000 years. It's intriguing to see how much devotion they had to their gods back then. Everything they built, they built in honor to the gods. The pharaohs spend their whole life preparing for their death. They kept building pyramids, temples, burial chambers, sarcophagus and sculptures to prepare themselves for the afterlife where they may rise to be a god. I am loving Egypt and all the rich culture! Now, I am off to the Sinai Peninsula where I will be diving in the Red sea, Inshalla(God Willing)!
The Importance of Death Some people have said that the point of living is to die. But I like to think that the point of death is to live. The apprehension of our foreboding death drives us to live our life to the fullest. To live a full life where we can do what we truly love. To wake up in the morning and be excited for the challenges of
Valley of the Queens
A temple for Queen Hapsuschet a new day. To find somebody to share your love with. This is what ‘life to the fullest” means. It’s the pursuit of happiness. But most often than not, the majority of us choose not to live our life to the fullest.
Most of us are so concerned with money that the pursuit of happiness becomes less of a priority. We created an idea that it’s OK to have a miserable job for 20 years because “it pays well.” We think that after we have slaved ourselves away with work, we’ll be able to live a happy life with all the money that we saved. Money mixes everything up for people. We start to think money can solve all our problems and bring happiness. But it really doesn’t. Explore poorer countries like Burma, Laos Philippines and India and you will find that the majority of the people are happier than in US or Taiwan. I believe this is because they value family, friends and community a lot more than money. They have made it their source of happiness. Even when they earn less than a dollar a day, they are still happy because they have this source of happiness
Horus
the falcon headed god to go back to at the end of the day. They live their life to the fullest because they appreciate what they have and make the best out of it.
I think that 100% of the people who go after their dreams and do what they love are happy people. Even if they fail countless times along the journey, they still have a smile that is wider than the rest of us because they are doing what they love. So the question is, how do the rest of us find the incentive to go after our own dreams? Simple. Give importance to death.
When we give importance to death, we realize how precious our life really is. I watch the news about people dying every day and I think it wouldn’t ever happen to me but that’s just naive. It could most definitely happen to me. We all pass away one day. Nobody’s impervious to death and so we should give importance to death. We should use it to help put things in perspective for ourselves. If I die tomorrow, will I die knowing that I lived a happy life? I could die at any given moment, am
I living my life to the fullest today? I have a dream, do I do everything I can to reach it before I go?
We all fantasize about our dreams, but we never really act on it because we always think we have more time to do it before we die. But some people don’t have that luxury. For most of us, we don’t know when we’ll die. But for people who have a fatal cancer, they know the exact day they die. Imagine how frightening it is to learn that you only 63 days left to live. But because they knew when they would die, they began to truly live. I’ve read such inspiring stories by cancer patients who transformed themselves the day they had cancer. They went out and did everything that they always dreamed of doing in life. They gained the courage to ask for forgiveness from the people they have wronged and sparked a touching reconciliation. They went and told all the people they loved how much they truly meant to them. One of them even proposed to his wife so that he could know what heaven would be like before he actually went. Because
every second counted, they left no more room for anger and allowed love to enter them. They understood the importance of death and so they gave even more importance to life. They were happy until the very end and a happy ending is all anybody could ever wish for.
I’m petrified of death, but in some way I think it’s actually quite poetic when it all comes down to the end. Our most selfless act as a human being comes when we take our last breath of life. No matter how greedy or selfish an individual has been in his entire life, he cannot escape that his very last act on earth will be a selfless one. The importance of death is that it also gives way to new life. If everybody could live forever, we’d make the world inhabitable by overpopulation. But when we die, we allow the next generation of people to experience the beauty of earth. To give up something as precious as our own life so that a stranger in the future can live is the ultimate act of selflessness. Whether we want to die or not makes no difference because in the larger
scope of things, we are giving back to the world and not taking anything with us in our deaths. We can’t take anything with us, not even our bodies. So when we die, the only thing we can do is give. We return our body back to Mother Nature, we provide inheritance for our family we love, we leave unforgettable memories for friends to laugh about and we pass down our knowledge to future generations. We give when we die. This has been the tradition of human beings for thousands of years and it will continue to live on. Take comfort in knowing that the people we loved did one final act of goodness before they left: they gave so others may live. And because we have been given life to live, we must honor it by living it to the fullest. Embrace death, but more importantly, embrace life.
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Nina
non-member comment
love
i really love this photo. it's so peaceful.