What have you achieved in life? This is a tough question for even geniuses to answer.
What have you achieved in life? This is a tough question for even geniuses to answer. And as common people who have at best a clever story here and a well-crafted sales pitch there, it is very difficult for many of us to answer this question when our time to bid goodbye to Earth comes.
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FOR HEAVEN SAKE: Novel by New York Times bestselling author Mitch Albom explores the unexpected connections of our lives, and the idea that heaven is more than a place file pic |
But here, one has to ask the question what constitutes an achievement? Are you successful if you had half a dozen luxury cars when you died? Should you die like a hero, saving children from a burning building? Or, should you go away after having raised children who are full of love and virtue?
It is very hard to answer these questions, but Mitch Albom handles this matter quite well in his book, 'The Five People You Meet in Heaven'. Though this is all of 200 pages, I was able to finish it in just one night I read it from 10 pm to 2 am because it was, to use a rather tired word in this context, truly unputdownable.
As a person who has written one book myself, I know that every book is a direct connection between the author and that particular reader. In this case, the link between me and Albom is perhaps the fact that our idea of paradise is different from what is usually held as the standard by the religious.
Albom in this book doesn't show heaven as a place where people have wings and harps. His heaven is someplace where you go to figure out what your life was all about. His protagonist, Eddie, actually finds out a lot of details about his life after he dies, not before.
Most importantly, Albom shows that Eddie, who had thought of himself as somebody who had not achieved much, was actually doing a great job by being the person responsible for maintenance at an amusement park because he spent all this life making the rides safer for kids.
Now, that is a great achievement, but what if heaven is not really a place as shown by Albom? What if you don't get to understand who you are after you have died? What if it is, as the religious people say, the place you go to if you have been good on Earth?
There is only one answer to this question it would be ideal for us to find out what we have truly achieved while we are still alive. Tough as this is, maybe all of us have to ask this question at least once a year and see what more we can achieve in the following year.
If you can work on that, then that would truly be an achievement.
