By Josmat Jerry
I vividly recall watching an action movie characterized by some breathtaking moments, suspense galore, bloody events, and do or die options which was fashioned with the title “A DEATH RACE”. Precisely, it was a car race among strong prisoners who were glued to winning the race to gain their freedom while being negligent of who dies or what goes wrong. In other words, it was a war in disguise, a survival of the fittest which involve the use of strong weapons such as pistols, rifles, revolvers, machine guns etc.
Anyone who fails to guide, drive his car well, or fail to knock down any opponent will be destroyed by his counterparts. At the end, the winner, who happens to be the last driver standing walks away with a huge amount of money after he had gained freedom. In a nutshell, it is termed death race because if you are not the winner of such a race, you will be a dead meat finding yourself in the pit of death, it is the last person standing adventure with a laissez faire or lackadaisical formality.
The above illustration is a modification and picture of what life race partially entails. The context of life has been envisioned to be a do or die affair by some aggressive individuals, these set of people believe that the best way to pull through the thick and thin of life adventures is being a hard-minded personality with a selfish attitude, and giving it all it takes to march in to their land of Canaan. Obviously, such individuals view life as a death race and a run for money, wealth, position, power and all others. They engage in all these tending to put the thought of life been a short epistle out of their mind. Well, maybe they are well innocent of this, but can they?
Actually, they are less concerned of who gets knocked down along the way, whom life they sacrifice or who they tend to destroy their destiny for their own sake is none of their business. As much as their ambition is concern they go extra mile seeking for influence and power by engaging in immorality platforms in search for a greener pasture.
A Chinese philosopher, Confucius once said, “Life is really simple but we insist on making it complicated”, Life is not as hard as we think it is, it’s nothing pertaining to a death race. Who are we racing against? Are we on earth to contest or be in competition with someone? Do we really need to take things hard on ourselves and those around us before we can achieve our goals in life? Must people suffer and sustain havocs for us to get to our promise land? In actual sense, being on this earth, we have to strive hard for ourselves in order to achieve our desired goal, we all want to make impact and inscribe our names in the good record book, make ourselves well known to people, and achieving this requires a whole lot of works. But, what is the essence of getting it all with bloody activities that will soon pull us to ground. The popular saying that we came to earth with nothing and we will go with nothing should always ring in our heart as it beats.
However, everything we get ourselves involved in must be done with the fear of the creator, anything we want to achieve in life, which we are capable of, will come our way if we go about it in the right sense and manner. A person who sets good plans and agenda for himself and pursue it with prayers, hard work and determination will surely get it right and perhaps, we might happen to encounter some challenges or difficulties on our way to success, they are bottlenecks that we will overcome.
They are only meant to strengthen us; they should not be a reason for us to get tired of trading along the right path as every good thing comes in a difficult way but last longer and forever than the ones achieved with bad deeds. The point is that life is not worth taking up as a do or die affair. What happens to a person who is forcing his way in to all areas and dies on the long run? All effort wasted! Things should not be done in a way that will later in life tarnish the dignity of our dear family because whatever we do today shall speak for our coming generations.
According to Tom Huddleston, “we all have two lives. The second one starts when we realize we only have one”. Our after life should always be of a great paramount to us. It should be of huge concern to us of where next we get ourselves into after we say au revoir to this earth. Remember, we are all sandy particles, and we shall all return to our source – a sandy content. Life is easy, life is hard – it all depends on how we go about it. In all, life is easy, not a death race!
