The professor at the University of Colorado, USA, started his lecture by distributing blank papers to his students and asking each one to write down his fears in life. When he collected the papers, he scattered them and chose from them at random to discuss those fears, including: fear of losing the target, or dying at an early age.
What interested me was the answer of one of them: I am afraid of being a forgotten person, and it is one of the types of “phobia” called (Athazagoraphobia).. This feeling shook some Westerners; Where the bonds of the weak relationship with the elderly and people with memory loss «Alzheimer's», and in most cases they end up languishing in social care centers without their families caring about them.
The level of fear of some may be limited to being forgotten while they are alive, but we find that others are concerned with the idea of not being forgotten after his death, and when the Prophet of God Abraham – upon him be peace – asked his Lord to perpetuate his remembrance and broadcast it among the creatures (and make me a tongue of truth in others ); His Lord answered him (and we left him in the others).
There is a blessing in being forgotten as one of the forms of freedom, for example the poet Mahmoud Darwish said in his poem:
How free you forgotten in the cafe!
No one sees the effect of the violin on you
It seems that Darwish prefers to be forgotten, isolated from people and their nonsense, but his memory is still alive and his poems are present in the minds of readers and intellectuals.
The important question: Do we have to actively seek to leave a trace and perpetuate our names in our lives and after our death? .. Writer Amal Al-Zahrani says in her blog: “I believe that the greats throughout history became great because they had an obsession with a problem that made them uncomfortable, paralyzed them from being preoccupied with anything else. Therefore, their focus was on finding a solution to this problem, not on finding an opportunity to leave an impact through it, and as a natural result of dedicating their lives to solving a specific problem, for example, they had an impact, and therefore I think we are obsessed with the wrong question! Instead of how can I be the owner of an impact? Perhaps it would be best to ask, What issue do I want to contribute to?
I agree with what al-Zahrani mentioned, and I add: striving to immortalize a person’s name in this world has pleasure and pride for him or his offspring, but more important than all of this: that a person strives to be known to the people of heaven just as he is fully keen to be mentioned well by the people of the earth, so how many shaggy Dust pushed by the gates, but with God it weighs the fullness of the earth and the heavens.
I conclude with the words of “Emily Dickinson”: “If you can improve the life of one person, or relieve one pain, or guide a bird to its nest, your life will not be in vain.”
Asim Abdel Fattah @asimabdulfattah
