The ALS (Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis) Ice Bucket Challenge has clearly gained a lot of social media attention. Every day I open my Facebook account to at least 3 new posts of friends completing the Ice Bucket Challenge. It is true that this seems to be a very effective way of gaining the public's attention regarding the condition known as ALS. And on that note, I am very happy that more and more people have come to realise how terrifying ALS can be to those affected by it. The Ice Bucket Challenge had certainly successfully promoted public awareness of the condition. 

Could it be when your world of sorrow and troubles become too overbearing like a tsunami wave threatening to crash upon the shores of life, you find the unrealised ability to build a tiny hut to store your most precious, in a hut made of wood, firm in its foundations, able to withstand the threatening wave. Nothing would be able to stop the wave - it is like the course of nature, an inevitable phenomenon. But as the dark waves crash upon the shores of life, destroying everything else, the small but sure hut remains. And after the chaos has ended, from that hut emerge a small ray of hope and continuity of building back everything on the shores of life.

That hut is the defence mechanism of every person out there. When all is lost, when everything has fallen into the deep chasm of chaos, we eventually find a single ray of hope that would eventually guide us back to the path of life. We bury that hope deep down somewhere in the depths of our subconsciousness, only to reveal it in desperate times. Sometimes, the destruction is so vast that the hut becomes unseen to our eyes and that hope gets buried so deep that we could only reach for it with the guidance of the people around us. And in times when your bitterness from the disaster has managed to isolate you from the world, leaving you completely on your own, you forget and you lose that ray of hope, and you continue your spiral down the depths of bitterness, loneliness and eventually self-destruction.

People come and go in our life. But the people who stay, who help you build that hut and find that hope, who help you regain normality, that you should never let go of.

Life is fragile. It is a fact not worth denying.
A moment of weakness, a shadow of doubt, an honest man's mistake, and life can come crashing down. Our bodies, they crumble. All it takes is just the protest of a single cell, or an alteration of a gene, to cause the world to shift, to cause a life or lives to be affected, broken, changed. Our bodies, they are weak. They last a lifetime, no more, no less. From the moment we are borne, to the moment we disappear feet below the ground, our bodies continue to be broken. Each day, every day, our bodies degenerate. True enough, we regenerate as well. Until it comes a time when the cycle slows and eventually stops, and only degeneration remains. That is the cruel fate of mankind.

And yet.

Man continues to thrive, to achieve far beyond imagination, to break beliefs and to set new sights. If life itself is so fragile, why should there be anything positive from life itself? Why not sit and wait for the final destiny of life to come along? Why not simply wait for death? It is an inevitable fate, so why deny it?

Because along with life, comes spirit. If there is one thing that man has, it is spirit. The will to live life to the fullest. We thrive because we have the will to thrive. We fight illness because we refuse to succumb to such fates. We refuse to be broken. We refuse to sit idly, awaiting death. We fall, we break, yet we pick ourselves up and keep on going, we keep on fighting.

Bodies break and disappear beneath our feet, long forgotten. Why fight a useless fight?

A pebble thrown to the ocean bears no significance. Yet it causes ripples that travel miles outwards.
Our actions bear no obvious significance. Yet it does. Because we often forget. That every one of our action affects one or perhaps, a million other people. If it takes a single cell to protest and break our bodies, then surely a single person standing up, refusing to succumb to the path laid out before him or her, can cause change. Because that one person's action can cause a ripple in the woven fabric of someone else's life, which could begin a continuous course of effects. The body dies, the spirit moves on, but the memory lives on. It may or may not be enough to be written into history, but it is enough to live on in the memories of those closest and dearest to you, or even a random stranger who's life has been touched by your memory and your spirit.

So scratch, claw and fight, and when the inevitable comes, embrace it with open arms, knowing with comfort and satisfaction, that it has been a good fight.