I was travelling back from Seoul to Mumbai after an official meeting last week. I was waiting in the lounge for my next flight for Mumbai.  When I opened my phone, I got a message that our employees’ union president had died.  He was a progressive union leader and a thought leader.  He was physically fit and used to run marathons every year.  He recently retired from our company after working for 40 years.  A rare feat for any employee.  He goes for a morning jog, then gets admitted to a hospital and is declared dead.  Life is so uncertain – you have to experience it to believe it.

If we look back at our own lives, it is no different.  We begin the day with some plans and end the day with something else.  Many a time, we have to manage the change without necessarily creating it.  Such is life.  We have to accept it and move on.  While it is easy to reflect on it,  it is very tough to face it.  Imagine being in the family of my union president.  He was a wonderful human being and physically and mentally fit.  I met him last week and we discussed on how we can further strengthen management and union relationships.  Such was the vision of the man.  Then one fine day after a morning jog, he collapses in a hospital bed.  How can one digest it ? Its unthinkable in anyone’s life.

However, such is uncertainty of life today.  I was reading an article on the flight of a very successful professional in the USA.  He was the envy of all his colleagues.  He had done excellently in his career and had a great family and enviable wealth. One fine day he gets up and gets the news that he has lost his job.  Can we think this was a bad dream ?  It is not so.  It is the reality of his life , that day.  Whether one likes it or not, one has to accept it and move on.

It happens in professional life and it happens in sport and in our personal lives too. We had a captain of our national hockey team.  He is prolific player and a great backbone of our team.  He had some personal issues and lost his captaincy one fine day.  One does not know if the personal issues led to his loss of captaincy but the fact that a successful player loses his recognition at the pinnacle of his career shows how uncertain life is.  An olympic aspirant was dropped from the national team when she had gone home to pack her bags for the trip.

The photo above was Uday Mahale, the president of our union, who was running marathons every year.  But after his morning jog, he collapsed on the jogging track and was declared dear on arrival in the hospital.  Such is the uncertainty of life.

Most of us postpone to live life to the fullest.  We think we can do that in the future.  We think today is not the right time to be happy.  We have a lot of responsibilities in life so our celebrations can wait.  We need to realise that tomorrow is today and today is now.  Lets try to live each day as if a tomorrow does not exist.  Lets try to do all the good we can today without waiting for that elusive tomorrow.  If we postpone for tomorrow what we can accomplish today, we can never be sure if we can make it.  We need to learn to live life as if it exists only for today.

The best time to live life to its fullest is now.

What do you think ?

S Ramesh Shankar