By: Amal Javed Abdullah
I received news only a few days ago that a friend, a graduate student full of life and ambition, just passed away. For me, as I enter the month of Ramadan, this story really serves as a reminder that life is fleeting — that one’s time, and the hours and minutes of which it consists, is fleeting.
There is a metaphor in Pakistani culture, often introduced as a bedtime story to lisping children in motherly laps, referred to as “zindagi ki dore.” With zindagi meaning life, dore meaning a thread or a string, and ki used as the possessive adjective, the phrase loosely translate as “The Spool of Life.”
The story goes that there was once a boy who found himself in trouble for a silly childish mistake — one’s imagination does not have to wander far to think of an example. Ashamed, he went to the park and began to cry beneath a tree when a Good Fairy came to him, and in typical bedtime-story style, asked the little boy why he weeped so. When he explained, she offered him a solution in the form of a zindagi ki dore, a spool of thread that represented the duration of his life. If he were to ever find himself in a similar situation to what he was currently experiencing, he would only have to snip a tiny bit of the thread. The Fairy cautioned him, however, to use the spool wisely and only cut in absolute necessity.
Overjoyed, the boy returned home with the spool. The next day, his teacher handed back an assignment on which he had received a poor grade. Embarrassed, he took out his spool and snipped a tiny bit of the thread, which instantly transported him from 8 a.m. in the classroom to the end of the school day, waiting in the courtyard for someone to pick him up. The boy instantly understood the usefulness of the contraption: skipping the hard moments. Soon after, at home, the boy broke his mother’s prized vase, and fearing her wrath, took out his spool. Right as she came marching in, her face red and seething, snip! He got away just in the nick of time. Later, he fell off his bike, breaking his leg in the process. Unable to handle the pain, he snipped off some more of the thread until his leg had healed. More incidents of childish dilemmas passed — a scraped knee, a fight with a friend — and each time, the boy snipped away the moment on his spool of life and escaped it.
I interpret the story to mean that the boy does, in fact, get bullied at recess because of his low grade, get a scolding from his mother, but he doesn’t have to live through the experience — his mind and memory are in another place.
As he grows into adulthood and faces the peaks and valleys of growing, he snips away his life whenever confronted with discomfort. Soon enough, he finds himself an old man, a wizened elder withering in the pains of old age. In hindsight, he reminisces on his life, and in sagelike fashion reflects that he has cut his life too short. He has passed too many moments without fully experiencing them, and lost too much time by not living it — he has snipped away too much. Sorrowfully, he returns to the tree where he found himself in his childhood, and weeps once more on what his life has become.
To his surprise, the Good Fairy appears once again, and this time addressing him as an old man, asks him again why he is crying. He explains to her why, and she reminds him that she warned him against using it excessively. She waves her magic wand, once more in typical fairytale style, and promises him a chance at a new life. She leaves and he falls asleep, and he wakes as a boy once more to relive his life, this time without the responsibility of his whole life in physical form.
As a child, I don’t think I gave this story much thought beyond the fact it would be cool to have a spool like this one. Who wouldn’t want to skip a boring lesson at school? As an adult, this story really strikes me because of its compelling conceptualization of life and time as a length of thread with a set size. It makes me think that our lives are really just a determined number of seconds, minutes and hours. It really expands your mind to think about time in its entirety, about you as an infinitesimal speck on a pinpoint in the enormous span of time that the universe has been in motion. It emphasizes the transiency and brevity of our lives in the grand scheme of time.
This makes me think about living life meaningfully and purposefully. By this, I don’t necessarily mean being productive all the time. In high school, I was obsessed with the idea of productivity. I was a high-achiever with crippling performance anxiety, and I had this almost self-harming idea of being super productive. With a few more years of experience behind me, I’ve come to realize that “super” productivity, as I thought of it, is a pretty materialistic notion that only helps rich people become more rich (but this is another rant for another time).
When I think about using time meaningfully, I think about being intentional about how we use our time. If our life is the hours in our day, then we should at least live them in an enjoyable way. Live with no regrets and no missed moments. Do everything wholeheartedly, with passion and vigour. If you’re going to party, party ‘til you drop. But also, if you’re going to write a paper, write the best paper you’ve ever written: your absolute best work, not some half-assed, last-minute, procrastinated garbage. If you’re going to save the world, then buddy, you better save the eff out of every last person. If you’re going to binge-watch Netflix, watch ‘til your eyes burn. Do everything you can with as much passion and zeal as you can. Don’t do things for mediocre reasons, do them intentionally, with purpose.
Really, the things that we blow up to great proportions — an argument, a bad grade on an assignment, a new outfit that we really need to buy — are all transient and temporary. What really matters is the purpose and value with which we use the moments we have, the value we put in the lives of others, and the value we put out to the world at large.
