Looking at 21 year Aliff Daniel, the Malay Muslim man who is going viral today for openly practising non-Muslim rituals — such as piercing his body, taking the kavadi, and wearing the headgear associated with demigods in Thailand — made me remember a line from the movie Jurassic Park
“Life finds a way.”
In the movie, the scientists at Jurassic Park assure everyone that they have engineered the dinosaurs so that they cannot reproduce in the wild.
But one of the heroes of the movie, played by Jeff Goldblum, refutes that assurance with one simple and straightforward line:
Life finds a way.
Life indeed finds a way. It finds a way because life is filled with stress that needs a way to be relieved.
In life, you will feel angry, bitter, disappointed, afraid, bored and restless.
And in life, you will have ambitions, desires and needs.
No one really knows why all of this is necessary.
Why do we have to eat our meals again and again when we have eaten them countless times before and already tasted everything that there is to taste?
Yet we will continue to eat anyway.
It might be useless for us to regret things that have already happened or worry about things that may never happen.
But regret and worry we still will.
No one knows why Anwar needs to be the PM even when he is already 80 years old or why Elon Musk wants more billions when he can't even spend the billion he already has.
But They still want it anyway.
My point is that when dealing with life, we have to accept that life has its own force — a force that causes everything that is alive to find a way.
You cannot simply tell a person who has certain fears, needs, regrets and ambitions that they cannot do anything to alleviate their distress or pursue their aims because it might collide with the “national interest”.
Nor can you simply tell people that you will provide everything they need in life and therefore they do not need to find their own way.
None of us can provide a way for everybody to live their life.
Our own lifespan is often insufficient for us to figure out how to live our own lives. The way we find for our own lives is often insufficient for us to relieve our stress.
How then can we possibly provide a way of life for someone else, when that person is not us — and may not even be able to relieve their problems with life with the way of life that we find satisfactory?
Asking people not to find their own way is, in many ways, asking them not to live.
And as *Jurassic Park* reminds us, that will never happen.
**Life cannot be contained. Life will always find a way.**
It cannot be contained simply because containing it would make the lives of scientists easier.
Nor can it be contained simply because an inability to contain it makes the lives of religious officials, bureaucrats or ministers more difficult.
People are not machines that can be programmed to behave according to someone else's preferred design.
They are living beings.
They have fears.
They have desires.
They have frustrations.
They have ambitions.
And sooner or later, whether we like it or not, they will try to find a way to deal with them.
If we cannot accept this, perhaps we should watch Jurassic Park again.
Because the real lesson of the movie was never merely about dinosaurs.
It was about the hubris of believing that we can control life simply because we have convinced ourselves that we have figured it out
Life finds a way.
TheRealNehruism (nehru.sathiamoorthy@gmail.com) is a content creator under the Newswav Creator programme, where you get to express yourself, be a citizen journalist, and at the same time monetize your content & reach millions of users on Newswav. Log in to creator.newswav.com and become a Newswav Creator now!
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