Break in History
Among the rules of government service in some countries there is one—that if a government employee doesn’t take approved leave and is absent from office, the government has the right to treat his case as one of ‘break in service’.
‘Break in service’ means that the employee will lose his seniority. In terms of employees’ rights, he may even go back to where he was on the very first day that he joined his job. He may lose the chances of promotion that his previous period of service might have entitled him to.
A ‘break in service’ is a break in an employee’s employment status. This same thing actually applies, on a much bigger scale, to every single individual—in what can be called a person’s ‘break in history’. With death, every person will experience his own personal ‘break in history’. His entire personal history, which he has so carefully spent his life trying to build, will, when death strikes him, suddenly be wiped off. And then, he will be rendered ‘history-less’, as it were.
In this world, every person stands on the foundation of the personal history that he has built for himself. Over the years, he avails of many different opportunities that come his way, through which he makes his life. Money and properties, family and friends, power and fame—such things gather around him, and with these he constructs a history for himself. It is through his history that his character and individuality are built. Through it he knows himself and others know him.
This is the case with all of us. Every person is constantly engaged in this process of making his personal history in this way, on the basis of which he forms his personal identity. But no one gets to live in his own history for very long. Suddenly—and in almost all cases considerably before 100 years—the moment of death arrives and a person is separated from all that he had lived amidst. This is everyone’s ‘break in history’ moment.
This event is bound to happen to each one of us. Every person spends his life trying to build a world of their dreams and hopes. But then, all at once, death strikes and he is forced to leave this world that he has constructed with such great effort. He now arrives in a world for which he may have made no preparation. Behind him is the world that he has left forever. In front of him is a world that stretches on forever but for which he may have done nothing.
The pre-death phase of life is for all of us the first and last opportunity that we will get. After this, no one is going to get a second chance. A person who wastes this one and only chance simply on running after worldly goods and sense-pleasures will be compelled to live in complete deprivation in the stage of life after death. Death will separate him from his previous history forever, while he will not have another opportunity to make a new history for himself.
How strange it is that most of us, being engrossed in the rat-race of this world, are completely oblivious of the opportunities that we can avail of only in this present life in order to obtain success in the eternal Hereafter! How terrible will be the deprivation that one will have to face in the Hereafter for this heedlessness!
