LIVING WITH A PURPOSE

                               LIVING WITH A PURPOSE

What should a person live for is a vital question. And it is a question which all human beings should be able to answer. A life without purpose, aim, ambition or aspiration is no life. It is not only meaningless but also wasteful. Ordinary people who lack reflective faculty do not think about the purpose of life, although they live an active, productive life in their respective fields of occupation. However, their contribution to the evolution of life is not very significant.  It is only those great social, political, religious, scientific, philosophical activists, scholars, researchers, discoverers and inventors who leave footprints on the sands of time and become men and women of all time.  Such people use their God-given abilities of head, heart and soul in the service of mankind most extraordinarily and become not only the lasting benefactors of mankind but also enlist themselves among the immortals.

Gandhi, Buddha, Mahavira, Mohammad, Guru Nanak, Shakespeare, Kalidas, Rabindranath Tagore, Alfred Nobel, Sir Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, Louis Pasteur, Sir J. C. Bose, Michael Faraday, George Stephenson, J.N.Tata, Henry Ford, Napoleon Bonaparte, Karl Marx, Raja Ram Mohan Roy, Sir Syed Ahmad Khan, Subhash Chandra Bose, Jawaharlal Nehru, Sardar Patel, Sir Mohammad Iqbal, and many more lived with a purpose , almost every day of their life, and consequently made themselves unforgettable in the annals of the world.

            Given below is a poem taken from the best poetry of the world.  Its author George Linnaeus Banks (1821-1881) was a British journalist, editor, poet, playwright, actor, orator and Methodist. But before I quote the poem let me add that the people who live with a purpose are highly creative and dynamic and never feel unmotivated or uninspired.   

The title of the poem is ‘What I Live For’.  Its beauty is that the poet here lives for multiple pleasures and duties of life.  He is not selective and isolationist but comprehensive and inclusivisi.   There is nothing for which he does not live because he thinks that this is the best way to fulfil ‘God’s great design.”

            WHAT I LIVE FOR

I live for those who love me,

Whose hearts are kind and true;

For the Heaven that smiles above me,

And awaits my spirit too’

For all human ties that bind me,

For the task by God assigned me,

For the bright hopes yet to find me,

And the good that I can do.

I live to learn their story

Who suffered for my sake

To emulate their glory,

And follow in their wake;

Bards, patriots, martyrs, sages,

The heroric of all ages,

Whose deeds crowd History’s pages,

And Time’s great volume make.

I live to hold communion

With all that is divine,

To feel there is a union

‘Twixt Nature’s heart and mine;

To profit by affliction,

Reap truth from fields of fiction,

Grow wiser from conviction,

And fulfil God’s great design.

I live to hail that season

By gifted ones foretold,

When men shall live by reason,

And not alone by gold;

When man to man united,

And every wrong thing righted,

The whole world shall be lighted

As Eden was of old.

I live for those who love me,

For those who know me true,

For the Heaven that smiles above me,

And awaits my spirit too;

For the cause that lacks assistance,

For the wrong that needs resistance,

For the future in the distance,

And the good that I can do.

21^st November 2019                                            G. R. KANWAL