Living The Life

By Hammad Anwar
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Living the Life, this is what we all do till the day we die, because after all as the saying goes, “dying is the day worth living for”. Call your life a failure or a success, whether you are rich or poor, it doesn’t matter because at the end of the day, in whatever conditions and circumstances you ARE living the life.

Let’s talk about my life, started about two decades ago; the first thing I noticed around me was my family. And to be honest till today, my family is the important thing for me. Growing up with a caring and lovely parents and having a fine childhood may not be a thing worthy to be noticed by many of us, but lets stop for a moment and think about the people of countries like Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia or Ethiopia. There half of the children are born orphan or loose their parents even before they even learn to say dad and mom. Let it be the war we have imposed on them or the hunger and lack of basic necessities of life, they are living the life they have, so I have to be grateful for that and I am.

Moving on, I grew up, went to school, college and eventually university where I am today. This educational journey of mine has been a relative smooth one with few hiccups, but that is part of everyone life. Lets start with the school, I got into a well reputed school, played in kindergarten, had crushes on my teachers, took part in debates and stage plays, had crushes on class fellows and finally walked out of the school with my head high and me booming with pride.

And then I entered college, the turning point of any student’s educational life. The point where choose which field you are going to work for rest of your life, you have to score good grades, get into some reputable university for your masters. I did this all, planned it, and tried to act accordingly with it. Though it didn’t go the way I wanted but still I managed to survive.

So, I entered the university, full of new dreams and plans, and till now I guess I have been on the right track. Life here has been good, what lies next is a mystery and there is no point over worrying over things you don’t know. The future looks uncertain as it always been.

So this is the life I had live up till now, had learned a lot willingly or unwillingly but the point I would like to emphasize is that I learnt it from people and from my experiences. I believe learning shouldn’t be restricted to books only. Just look at the list of successful men in this world, how many of them are graduates let aside Masters or PhDs. Look at our first learning experience, we didn’t learn to smile or clap or how to eat or wash our hands from any book, it was our mom who taught us. As we grew older, our dad took us to shopping, told us how the car and airplane works, we learned how to dress or make our hair style probably from our elder brother. We learned how to share things like stationary and lunch boxes from our friends. Even we learned about the power and value of money after hearing chants of bagger on the road. There is only one thing common in all above incidents and that these were people whom from we learnt from. Yes, education plays part in your life, yes it gets you a good job, yes it gets you new car and house, but it isn’t essential that still it makes you a successful man.

If you want to live a life of successful man then it’s a lot more than making money and living in luxury. Surly it gets you the most comfortable bed to sleep on or the latest car to drive, but what I believe is that a successful man is the one who sets a target whatever it is and then achieves it. The divine saying is “Man will get only what he has strived for”. The bitter truth is that success isn’t measured ever and there is no criterion, yet I have learnt that it is the best feeling in the world to achieve for which you had worked for.

So, after all these years, I believe I didn’t ask for the life what I was given, simply because nobody can ask for it, but what I know is that I did my best with it or at least I tried my best. This life had been a journey for me where I lost and gained, learned and was being taught, fell and rose again. So if you simply ask me what it had been, the one word answer I’ll like to give is, it was a: Test.