On the Brink of Death
One day, a man came to meet me at an odd time, and stayed for only a very short while. Unusually, he did not accept even a cup of tea. “I have to go home right away. My wife will be waiting for me,” he said, starting his scooter. And then he sped off.
Hardly half an hour after he had left, the telephone rang. It was his wife. She sounded very nervous. “Your friend…” she said. Her sentence was incomplete, but her sobbing completed it.
I put the phone down and at once ran towards his house. But by the time I got there, I learned that he had already died. He had left my place and reached his house. He was still on the stairs when he slipped and fell. Some people picked him up and took him inside. The doctor was called at once, but the only thing he did was to announce that he had already died.
When he had left my house on his scooter, he was, it seemed, heading towards his house. But actually he was heading towards death.
This is no chance event. Incidents like this happen every day and everywhere. Everyone who is alive today is actually rushing towards his death. What we—every one of us—are closest to is death. Everyone is standing on the brink of death. At every moment our last moment can arrive, when we will suddenly be lifted from this world and taken to the next, from where one can go only either to Heaven or Hell.
If a blind man walks on and reaches the edge of a well, everyone knows that the right thing to do is to warn him of the danger. At such a moment, people forget about everything else and scream out uncontrollably, “There’s a well there! A deep well! Beware!” But how very strange it is that the whole of humanity is standing at the edge of an even more dangerous ‘well’, but yet everyone is engrossed in many different things and no one feels the need to shout out, “There’s a well there! A deep well! Beware!” If someone who is overwhelmed by the plight of humankind shouts out like this, he would be rebuffed by others, who will say, “This man wants us to become cowards and put us to sleep! He wants to divert people from the real issues! He isn’t a messenger of life, but a missionary of death! He’s spreading despair and cowardice!”
People are standing on the edge of a well, but they think that they are in a safe home. They are advancing towards death but they fondly imagine that they are moving ahead on life’s journey!
