Acintya Shenoy, Week #4: The Teacher
“Ethics is nothing else than reverence for life.”
- Albert Schweitzer
I recently stumbled across this belief of Schweitzer’s in an issue of Parabola, a spiritual magazine. The words were simple, etched on a cleanly blank page next to a rough pencil sketch of Schweitzer furring his brow in contemplative thought. Yet, they struck deep.
The concept of reverence for life is simple: we’re all human, so we all cherish life, right? Should this not be an easily given principle, without needing to be explicitly said out loud?
Apparently not. Almost every human is afraid of death (we’ve all thought about it at least once), yet we turn a blind eye to the fragility and fleetingness of life. We easily become hostile when people become slight inconveniences; we scream and huff when people step off with their right foot instead of their left, and when people can’t make it to practice because their grandma died again, apparently. When we’re pissed off, our basic manners evaporate, and we turn a blind eye to the plight of others.
The absence of reverence for life doesn’t just affect interpersonal relationships—they have global repercussions. All over the world, civilian lives are being thrown away for the sake of political squabbles—take Ukrainians, Palestinians, Sudanese, Burmese, Uyghurs, Hispanic Americans, and more. These people, like anyone else, have wildly complex lives with an array of hopes, passions, goals, and feelings—all of which are supposedly represented by numerical statistics on charts people spend a maximum of 45 seconds looking at.
I don’t say all this to fearmonger or guilt trip; there’s already enough of that going around. My point is that people have forgotten that when all comes to an end, other people are also people. No matter what each of us says or does, we will all reach the same ultimate fate—death. With how easily this fate can be sped up, it only makes sense that we should love what humanity has while it still can. It only makes sense that we should revere life in the face of death, rather than throw it away.
Talk of ethics and moral dilemmas sounds pretty pretentious. The “golden rule” seems childish in a world increasingly hostile to itself. Yet Schweitzer still has a point: we are nothing if not alive, and we stand for nothing if not for life.
Acintya, I was not expecting to read such insightful ideas about purposes within life itself when I sat down to read the blogs of the week. Your ability to explain and exemplify behaviors and emotions that we all see in our day to day life but don’t give importance to is truly incredible; I was able to relate everything you were saying to my own life. I think this is a really important topic for many of us to think about, especially given the state of the world today, as you mentioned. It is necessary now more than ever to be conscious about the way we react to other people and the way we live our lives in general. Your last line was insanely powerful; it is admirable how you were able to phrase such complex ideas into insightful yet understandable statements.
ReplyDeleteThis is a really introspective piece and a lot of the thoughts you express in this piece are fairly uncommon but also ring true. It is true that people can be quick to turn to anger when things don’t go quite right, and it is also true that all people’s lives should be respected. However, people are complex creatures. We walk out everyday, we live our lives knowing that every minute of everyday, someone is dying. When you stop to think, every single minute you are alive, someone else is leaving this world, death becomes more mundane. And so does life. This often leads to the disrgard for life many people have developed, but even if someone dies every second you are alive, it doesn’t mean that person’s life is as important as everyone elses. Your expression of how we should revere life rather than take it since we will all die someday really resonates with me and the message is unquestionably true.
ReplyDeleteAcintya, despite this brief format of ideas that is a blog, I adore how deep you can be in your analysis of such a striking quote. I recognize exactly what you mean by growing frustrated in the instant someone cannot tell their lefts from rights—right when it really matters. This blindness to the ongoing lives of others is most certainly a plague which I myself am not immune to, nor is the rest of the world, especially to those who claim they are peacemakers. While I did take this presumed hostility as a truthful jab at my own fleeting ethics in times when I too, huff and puff, I really appreciate the recognition of the ever present guilt-tripping going around.
ReplyDeleteThis shared, essentially-human fate of death is such a strong point to delve into; I can only admire and grasp at the wholeness of which you write your analyses. The address to pretentiousness, fearmongering claims, and what reverence for life really looks like articulates and expands upon what I’ve felt about the world, but I could never put that into words like you’ve done here. I also love the image. It conveys such nuanced expression, fitting for the magazine issue!
(P.S. Sorry if I generalized or misinterpreted anything you wrote. I genuinely love your blogs but I might have mistaken some things here so I’m super duper sorry if I did.)