The value of a life

How do you measure life? What is its value?
Is it by the things we accomplish during it?
Or by the memories we make?
The things we feel, or the other lives we affect?

Are some lives worth more than others?
And how can you tell?
Who is to decide, if, say a cat’s life is valued less than a human’s?

We remember lives lost,
Celebrate those that begin,
Commemorate those we deem worthy,
But what of the rest?
The unspoken ones, unseen, unheard?
Those that passed by at lightning speed,
Hardly able to have an impact,
Are those valued less?

Every life has a purpose,
No matter what it may be,
No matter how many it touches,
It is a life created for a reason
And is valued no less for being what it is.

Just remember:
“man was created alone to teach you that whoever kills one life kills the world entire,
And whoever saves one life saves the world entire”*.

*paraphrased from the Talmud

Also part of Daily Word Prompt

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The genie’s wish

Would you like to live forever?

How many times throughout the centuries has that thought swiveled in the minds of humans?

To be immortal, unbreakable, untouchable.

To be able to live through everything and forever.

Today’s longest surviving people are almost 1.5 centuries old. They have experienced more developments and history than today’s generation even know about. They have seen the world evolve, crash and burn, rise from its ashes, and progress. They have seen technological advancements that gave life to things that in the past were considered almost impossible, but now we simply take them for granted. They have witnessed the world expand with everything that may be associated with that.

But they have also experienced great pain. For although they may be surviving unusually long periods of time, their loved ones are not. They are the ones who have had to say goodbye to so many of them and continue to live in a world without them. They are the ones who had to learn to keep going no matter what.

So, if you had a wish would you waste it on this? On living forever? Even if it did mean you would get to witness the future of this world, no matter how it would turn out to be? But knowing that it meant you would become that old person surrounded by new faces, feeling as an irrelevant part of history striving to survive in an all too modern age?

When Genie’s lamp was discovered and he was made to appear one last time, he himself was given a wish once freed. He could have anything. But Genie had seen enough wishes gone wrong to know better.

He did not wish for eternal life and immortality. Instead, he wished for something quite similar that would indirectly grant him precisely that, but without forcing him to suffer all the pain too.

Genie instead wished for eternal love and remembrance.