One life

He remained annoyed with himself until he realized that not knowing what he wanted was actually quite natural. We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come…There was no means of testing which decision was better, because there is no basis for comparison. We live everything as it comes, without warning, like an actor going on cold. And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself? That is why life is always a sketch. No, “sketch” is not quite the word, because sketch is an outline of something, the groundwork for a picture, whereas the sketch that is our life is a sketch for nothing, an outline with no picture. – ‘The Unbearable Lightness of Being’, Milan Kundera

A fly also lives

I was reading The Chosen on Shabbat afternoon and came across this passage which has always resonated with me, so I plucked it out of the text to share here.

“Reuven, listen to me, do you know what the Rabbis tell us God said to Moses when he was about to die? God said: “You have toiled and labored, and now you are worthy of rest. Human beings do not live forever... We live less the then time it takes to blink an eye, if we measure our lives against eternity. So it may be asked what value is there to a human life. There is so much pain in the world. What does it mean to have to suffer so much if our lives are nothing more then the blink of an eye…I learned along time ago, that the blink of an eye in itself is nothing. But the eye that blinks, that is something. The span of life is nothing, but the man who lives that span, he is something. He can fill that tiny span with meaning, so its quality is immeasurable though its quantity may be insignificant…a man must fill his life with meaning, meaning is not automatically given to life. It is hard work to fill ones life with meaning, a life filled with meaning is worthy of rest. I want to be worthy of rest when I am no longer here. Merely to live, to exist – what sense is there in that? A fly also lives.”

I also like these two quotations: from Rabbi N. Weinberg: “When you know what you're willing to die for, then you know what to live for.” and from Martin Luther King Jr. “A man who won’t die for something is not fit to live.”