Human beings are born, grow, develop, mature, age, and die. This is an inevitable cycle. Technically and administratively, there is nothing we can do about this cycle. We are but a tiny part within a system beyond our control, even beyond our comprehension, and we only have knowledge about the cycle of this tiny particle mentioned above.
So, if we can say that everyone on Earth would agree 100% with the fact that we are born to die, what are we living for? This is actually a very difficult question... Philosophical, religious, or psychological interpretations can be made, and different answers can come from different fields of study. However, with a little awareness and conscious effort, we can individually embrace an understanding that resonates within us.
Human beings, at every stage of life, are creatures who can live by setting hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, yearly, and long-term goals and often live forgetting the reality mentioned at the beginning, that is, they live life for themselves. The reason for this, in my opinion, stems from our tendency to manage our own lives to the extent of our comprehension capacity. That is, a small child shows a tendency to approach situations to the extent of what it can grasp, such as eating, an adolescent focuses on playing, a young person on earning money, and an elderly person on taking care of grandchildren, either as a goal or unknowingly as a duty. These are natural processes accepted in our own nature. We are inevitably using managerial functions such as planning, strategy, decision-making, action, analysis, risk, data, and experience to manage these processes, and these are reflexively occurring in our brains at all times. They are a kind of our management functions...
So, how will we manage the purpose of our lives? Understanding what we live for is intertwined with managing our lives. Just seeing this point to some extent leads to awareness, allowing individuals to look at themselves from the outside and think differently within this life cycle. However, the biggest challenge is to do this simultaneously as both oneself and as an observer... Most people will say that making good money and living comfortably until old age is their main life purpose, or having a healthy and peaceful life could be the main life purpose. When asked these questions, they will use them as answers to what we are living for...
The late Sakıp Sabancı once said, "I had everything in life, but I couldn't put shoes on my child and walk him." and he actually exhibited a dimension of awareness. Albert Einstein, lying in his crib in his final moments of life, said, "People are too concerned with the details of life." Similarly, the result of the dialogue between the old fisherman and the retired CEO in the anecdote comes to the same point...
Here is the critical point: Although this awareness occurs in our brains, how much can we differentiate and parallelly perceive and manage it with the goals in our daily life cycle!
In this regard, some struggling individuals seek an escape through substances or alcohol, some through music, some through yoga and meditation, some through sports, some through religion, some through sleep, but they fail to realize that being able to do the above comes from within themselves. That is, behaving like a processor that operates different processes simultaneously, and being able to achieve a greater output from the sum of different processes, will contribute to the formation of awareness and consciousness mentioned at the beginning. Feeling this will give us a different relaxation, tranquility, peace, and dimension within the life cycle.
We must not forget that, with the consciousness of having the answer to the question of what we are living for, while managing our lives as individuals, we are actually a whole of what we can do, as long as we are aware.
Dr. Bilinç Dolmacı
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