[170708] Life lessons

A meaningful story was told to me the other day: 2 brothers reside on the 80^th floor of an apartment building. The 2 brothers returned one day after an overseas expedition to find that the lift for their building was out of service due to routine servicing.

The 2 brothers decided to climb up the stairs to go home, the climbing started pleasurably enough, with both of them joking and talking with each other but upon reaching the 20^thth floor to retrieve the bags at a later time. floor, they were both exhausted and decided to leave their bags on the 20

Without the additional burden of the bags, both brothers found it a lot easier to climb up the stairs but by the time they reached the 40^th floor, they were even more exhausted and began to quarrel and complain while trying to find fault with one another. It turned out that one of the brothers had read about the lift servicing but had forgotten about it. The other brother scolded him for not remembering the notice and they continued to quarrel as they climbed.

When they reached the 60^th floor, they were thoroughly exhausted but were determined to finish the last leg of the climb. Though unhappy with the situation, both brothers kept to themselves and climbed in silence as they laboured on with the arduous task.

When they finally reached the 80^th floor and their home, they realised one important thing, they had left the keys to the house in one of their bags and it’s already too late to go down and try to retrieve it.

Take this story as an analogy of life. The 80 storeys in the apartment building represent our lifetime. When we were young, we were full of dreams, ambitions and hopes but as life progressed, we find that we are increasingly burdened by our dreams, ambitions and hopes. By the time we are 20, we have discarded all of them for more realistic and practical aspirations.

By the time we are 40, we find that life isn’t a bed of roses so we begin to complain, whine and find others to blame for our misfortune, our lack of luck and everything that didn’t go according to our grand scheme of life. By the time we reach 60, we became overwhelmed by the workings of our society and we just took everything good and bad in our stride and laboured on in life in silence. More often than not, when we reached 80, we find that we have lived a largely unfulfilling life and that the most important thing that matter the most to us was left behind back when we were 20. Life is a one way journey; we can never go back and re-live the dreams we had.