Alive, but are we living?

It was a lovely day of a long walk through the MacRitchie trail followed by a nice lunch and cold beer at a cosy bar.

The radio was on and some deejay was reading the news. I didn't really care but suddenly, I heard it.

Yasmin Ahmad had passed away from a stroke.

The Malaysian director who did a TVC for my company before my time.

It was tough to get my head around that.

She was so much alive, and we had discussed her and her works from time to time, and now she's gone.

Just like that.

Loads of people die unexpectedly everyday, and one could argue that it's silly or unfair or, I don't know, perhaps even frivolous, that I am so disturbed by her demise in particular, especially when I never even knew her personally.

Truth is, I am not even sure how I can rationalise this adequately.

I suppose one of the most obvious reasons will be that this is someone who is known to the public at large, and by this line of reasoning, it is justified that we feel something - anything - when someone we know in any manner leave this world.

And from that thought, it can be explained that the feeling will intensify if he or she had been a person of significant achievements.

And when we talk about achievements, it will not just be the works themselves, but the kind of person one has to be in order to do all that.

For Yasmin Ahmad, it doesn't take much imagination to link her achievements to talents, grit, and truckloads of passion. Whether we liked her work or not is irrelevant. It would still have taken her all those qualities and more to get to where she had gotten before the stroke took her away.

And those qualities are hugely admirable. Or, actually, enviable seems like the better word.

She died. But she had lived. She wasn't just alive in the physical sense all these while. She was living her dreams, her visions, her passions.

Are we just alive? Or are we truly living this life?

What do we live for? Who do we live for? What does it really mean to have really lived?

It could be that one had saved or changed the lives of others. It could be fighting a good fight to seek to arrive, or the eventual arrival, at the top of the career ladder. It could be the quest to be a good daughter or son or wife or husband or mother or father, or simply a good person.

Put it simply, it would be all that a person had done to lend meaning to his or her life.

A life that's worthy of regrets should it end before its time, simply because of the promises it holds. Whatever that meaning may be.

How many of us are truly living this life?