Chapter Ninety Eight: The Dictionary of Acts

There are these many people who arguably categorize human necessity into two major categories: either it is a want or it is a need. These two broad grouping, according to them, is very much essential in managing someone's life affairs, whether it is in financial terms or anything that pertains to impulsive buying (or marketing ploy); but mostly, it is a classification about money and investments. Then, everybody is devotedly enjoined to segregate the two, by choosing and organizing economic decisions based on what was defined from those two ideas taken together.

However, there is something terribly missing upon close confrontation of what was contained in these two major decisions. While the two ideas naturally covered the essentials of the management of wealth as well as the attached obligations necessary to its preservation by making sound decisions, it is obviously lacking something. Something that is very important.

Because humans are created not just by having a physical body but also by having a soul, taken as a whole in one, singular being, the latter is most often ignored in the pursuit of secularly defined prosperity (or the happiness attributed to it). As the physical body is nourished by either a need or a want, the soul also requires its own necessity.

And this necessity is called longing.

It is acknowledged that there are many authors and writers (even before this writing) who have organized physical needs into a visual hierarchy in order to understand the different kinds of motivation needed to retain workforce or inspire personnel performance, but the longing of the soul is usually ignored.

This illustrated hierarchy recognizes the fact that as human beings fulfill a certain need, he strives to reach for the next available need as part of his lifetime goal, which validates the fundamental concept of insatiable needs as discussed in the discipline of economics. Because the actors in economic activities are rarely contented with what they currently have (always wanting by achieving for more when the opportunity is there), when coupled with the fact that economic resources are scarce, there will always be a fierce competition in allocating these limited resources.

People spend many years of their life trying to get more share of these scarce resources, usually by ignoring a certain part of their existence by focusing their attention more on career orientation without any regard to what really matters. Although everything that we strive for are technically needed for our survival (because it brings a certain satisfaction over a period of time), the longetivity of that satisfaction is usually the question that remains.

Evaluating the need from the want, and its segregation is, of course, a wise decision to make. 

But time is a limited resource, too, and, even before we knew it, it finally comes to an end. Maybe the end will not come abruptly; it will come in a slow aging in a retirement home. And as time passes by in old age, we will then start to feel the longing of the soul. All the memories are now trying to get out of our hearts because the soul is preparing itself to return to the eternal. As physical bodies weaken, the soul then becomes mightier than the flesh, which bonds us closer to God, or some form of a higher power, whichever our beliefs will eventually take us.

Nothing else will really matter in the end. As the soul longs for that lost opportunity called regret, the body quietly pleads guilty to all the desires that once governed the value of our existence. The soul accounts for our collective consciousness, and it will coerce us to say goodbye to the many memories that we long for, but will never come again.

Premises considered, all the entries made to the Dictionary of Acts will be rendered worthless, until that inevitable thing finally arrives. And then it becomes eternal.

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This Chapter is sponsored by Reebok.