The irony of life is that it takes a life time to learn about life - Essay Example

In shake spears Merchant of Vernicle, Gratian purports that life is a stage where every man has a role to play, and everyone must play their part (Shakespeare). While life might be a compared to the stage, and people actors, there is no equivalent for rehearsal and one has to make it up as they go along. Ironically, the lessons one learns from life’s school of experience are often indicative of what one should have done in an event that has already occurred, and is unlikely to be repeated or reversed.

Indeed some lessons take a lifetime to learn and one dies without having benefited from the said experience except in that they can claim to have “learnt”. Consider the example of a businessperson who puts their business before everything else, they spend or their time working, ignore their family and probably end up in terrible health since they hardly ever made time to take care of their health. Like many wealth people with his characteristics, the richer he gets the more self-entered he becomes (Grewal 1).

Thirty years down the line, the same individual, is contemplating his vast business empire from his deathbed with no one to visit him expect those interested in inheriting his wealth. His critical health and poor social relations result to his being alone in his last hours, and he realizes that, the most important thing in this life is not how much money you make, but how you use it to change your life and others for the better. A cliché, but nonetheless, a common moral lesson that has taken him a lifetime to learn, and when he finally gets it, he has no life left in which to practice it.

Considering this analogy and many similar ones that can be drawn from life the irony of it all becomes clear, stuff takes a lifetime to learn, but that is all the time anyone has.Works CitedGrewal, Daisy. “How Wealth Reduces Compassion”. Scientific American. 2012. Web. 26 September 2012. William Shakespeare. The Merchant of Venice. Readprint.com. n.d. Web. 26 September 2012