Your three most valuable resources are (in no particular order) time, your health, and your memory.
Health - your physical condition is precious
Time - your time on this earth is finite
Memory - a man is the sum of his memories
Start with your health, your physical condition. At best, you are healthy and physically fit. But that isn't a given, as it is also very possible to be unhealthy and physically unfit. Your health directly correlates with how you feel, both physically, and mentally. While we cannot control what we we are born with, we can control how we use and treat our bodies. Ideally, we treat our bodies well.
Health is then multiplied by the dimension of time. We all live our lives moment by moment. Some people live longer than others, and everyone spends their time living doing different things. While we can never know exactly how much time we have left on this earth, we can control how we spend it. Ideally, we spend it efficiently.
Our existences are then measured by our memories. As beings of consciousness, we are the sums of what we remember. What we have experienced in life becomes a part who we are, and what we do not remember at some level does not. Ideally, we experience that which is worth remembering.
It seems daunting to imagine that these are the most valuable resources since each one of them can be tremendously impacted by outside influences as well as change in ways out of our control. Disease can wreck a person's health, or it can diminish memory, like in the cases of cancer and Alzheimer's. Time can be robbed from a person by events out of their control, like traffic. Transcendence above and beyond what is of this earth would get a person past the limitations out of their control. But according to Maslow, we can't achieve that without having everything we need in the baser levels. How do we reconcile value of our selves when any of these categories falls short?
ReplyDeleteI think that a mans worth is also valued by the positive impact of the people around them. And that their actions aren't belittled any if nobody remembers. Even if a man forgets he invented shoelaces he still had value to the world for it even if everyone else forgot as well. It made an impact. Also, its important to take into account what the man would do in a situation given his way of thinking. If a firefighter would save a cat from a tree; but for some reason no cat was stuck in a tree, does it make the man any less than he would have been? This article has really got me thinking.
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