This morning, while waiting for a tram to work and listening to a very nostalgic Ethiopian jazz piece, my life suddenly flashed before my eyes. It has been a struggle. I have known and passively accepted that for a while now. Instantly, a second thought crossed my mind - that life is a struggle. There are billions of people in a state worse than I am in, as far as the means of survival are concerned. These people also struggle daily. And there are those who have all the means and ways of life at their most convenient disposal, brought by luck or loot. These too struggle. It is difficult to imagine, but yes they do!
Take a drop of water from a pond, put it on a glass slide, and observe under a microscope. You will see a microcosm of life, where little organisms are running around, searching for food or escaping a threat. Go to a savannah in East Africa, and you will observe a gazelle and a cheetah, a lion and a zebra, a hyena and a donkey, all struggling to survive. Life is a struggle for everyone, whether you are a bacteria, a lab mouse, a zebra, a cheetah, a poor world citizen, or a ruthless, greedy capitalist. Yes, life is a struggle.
Struggle, from molecular to species level, is what defines us as living beings. Against all odds of cosmic chaos, life emerged! It took hundreds of millions of years for the very basic forms of life to emerge on this planet. It took several hundreds of millions of years for those simple life forms to adapt, evolve and become more complex. Imagine what the world would have been like now if those archaic life forms had no difficulties to overcome. Or even better, imagine if they did not struggle to overcome all the difficulties they encountered on the way. You and I, along with all our close and distant relatives would never have came along! During all those hundreds of millions of years, life had to struggle. It had to find a way... a way to live! The planet froze and bioled, yet life found a way. The planet got flattened and reflattened by cosmic bombs of meteores destroying almost all life, yet life found a way! Struggle, it seems, is a way of life. It is what makes life what it is and what it will be. This holds true from a struggle for personal developent to the struggle of apes and mammals and vertebrates and animals and living things to persist as the entities that they are. Indeed, what does not kill you only makes you stronger! And a life without struggle is as alive as a non living.
Now, the most interesting question is: But why? Why does life struggle, aspire, strive to persist, to be more of its kind? Why, against all odds, does life want to struggle? What does it aim to achieve at the end? From a bacterium to a humble homo sapien, what is the essence, the ultimate goal of life?
Certainly, if evolution has brought us here, it will take us somewhere more complex, unfathomable for our current intelligence. Are we, as living things, on a journey of some kind? A journey called for a higher cosmic glory? Or is life just another incidence in this mysterious universe, an incidence that just happened to struggle for nothing other than its own selfish desire to persist?
We as human beings may never be able to answer these questions.
Neverthless, these questions get us thinking, reflecting. They place our personal woes and concerns in a grander frame. They connect us to everything else, while simultaneously degrading our ego and teaching us humility. We put forth theories, explain the universe, conqure nature to our selfish desires. That is alright; it is the kind of life form that we are! (Perhaps we will pay the price for it sometime.) But when it comes to the real reason for life, its struggle, its ultimate journey, we are no better than the many bacteria we carry in our intestines.
