Life isn't easy. From the moment we are born, it is a constant struggle. We get hungry, we get tired, we get lonely, we get ill, and on and on and on. And then, boom!, we die. It's enough to drive you crazy. So we often try to avoid life, cheat death, or act as if death isn't coming. We delude ourselves, take unnecessary risks, or act recklessly. What we really need to do is take the time we are given and live it. According to the Population Reference Bureau, almost 108 billion people have ever lived on earth. And 101 billion of those all have something in common -- they're all dead. So you're not going to buck the trend, no matter what you do. There's a quaint story from Egypt that illustrates this so readily.

There was a man who married a wife of whom he was very fond. But after a while the wife died. Then the man wandered away in order to find a country in which no one died. So he went from place to place, looking for a town where there were no graves. At last he came to a town in the Sudan where there were no graves. So he remained here, in the house of the sheik. The sheik made a feast for him, and first offered him a piece of a roasted leg.

"Where is your father?" asked the man.

"This is his leg," said the sheik, "the rest of him is up there," pointing to a shelf.

Then the man learned that when anyone fell ill, he was killed and eaten, and that this was the reason there were no graves. So in the night he ran away back to his own country.

This very short tale tells us two important things. First, you're not going to escape anything by running away from it. Life has certain things in store for us, and there's no avoiding or cheating them. All you can really do is hasten it to you, which is not really what you want.

The second point of the tale is in the last sentence. The man went back to his own country. In our real world terms, that would be returning to our life and living it. Not to say that we shouldn't make efforts to improve our lot in life (we definitely should!), but we can't hate our life and hope to come out at the end with something better. It just doesn't work that way. So take what you have and run with it, because, in the end, it's all you have anyway.

Have a question, problem, thought, or just a comment? Want to know what fairy tales say about some other topic? Send it to me and I'll post it here!