What is life? A river that moves gently and calmly at times, without making any noise, and at other times violently smashing on rocks. Sometimes the water falls from a height and gets scattered, and many a time it moves slowly to reach an ocean.
What is life? A drama that consists of both happy and sad episodes, in which sometimes you are the hero and sometimes zero. Sometimes you misunderstand and sometimes you are misunderstood.
What is life? A journey which gives moments to enjoy and moments to lament. If everything in the universe has been created with purpose, how come our sufferings or dew drops of our life are purposeless? Not at all. The way the blacksmith shapes the iron with heat and hammer and anvil, the same way sufferings mend a person and turn him into a worthy human being. As a Kashmiri poet puts it very beautifully: “Hayat ken silsilan pakwun chu rozun, Dokhan daiden gaman wadwun chu rozun”.
Life is not always full of sunshine and rainbows. Where there is rose, there is thorn, where there is dusk, there is dawn. Every cloud has a silver lining. The lovers of God never enter the neighbourhood of despair, for they know time is needed for the crescent moon to become full.
What is life, a lofty hill where man’s feet stumble and have to overcome the tedious ascent by hard efforts. We live in a world that is a mixture of contraries. Happiness and sorrow, pain and pleasure, success and failure. These opposing entities go hand in hand and they turn our life more beautiful. We can taste the flavour of happiness only if before it we had been suffering. When you have gone through suffering, pain and agonies, you have a story to tell.
We surely travel from stage to stage. The chilly days of chilai kalan give way to the sunny days of spring. So, these dew drops of life should not trouble us, no matter how troubling things might seem. Where all the doors are closed, God will open a new door for us. As a poet says: “Qaid e hayat o band-e-gham asl mai dono aik hai, Maut say pehlay aadmi gham say najaat paye kyon”.
To conclude, sorrows have their own place in our life and they make us experience joy. Suffering shows us the divine spark of life that cannot be kept burning without struggle. Pain is the oil to feed the lamp of life. Life is all about struggle, but it is the struggle that paves the path to progress and nurtures the method of discovering the hidden capacities of life.

The writer has a PG degree in Islamic Studies from IUST Awantipora. [email protected]

Parvaiz Mir