What is a Life worth living?

In a span of a week 2 celebrities took their own life, Kate Spade and Anthony Bourdain. Whilst I know very little of Kate Spade beyond the colourful handbags on display, I love to watch Antthony Bourdain's program, travelling across the world to understand each country's culture through its cuisines and street food. I enjoyed his honest and humourous remarks often spiced with a tinge of sarcasm. You relate to him when he described places and food which you have visited and tried. I especially feel this connection when he remarked about Singaporeans:  " Remember this is a culture where there's no shame in a big bowl of steamy noodles or laksa first thing in the a.m.".

Coincidentally I just read Sylvia Plath's "The Bell Jar" a week before these suicides. Plath also took her own life and the novel is partially based on her own life. One gets a glimpse of the experience of someone suffering from depression. For the author it was like being trapped in a bell jar smoothered with endless ruminations of self doubt, dejection and suicidal thoughts.

Anthony Bourdain's suicide however came as a shock to me. For me, on the TV at least, this is the guy who knows how to truly appreciate what life has to offer. Of course that is before I googled about him after his passing. Even his mother told the New York Times, "He is absolutely the last person in the world I would have dreamed would do something like this." This is a person who seems so focused in his vocation, so in touch with himself and the world that it is hard to believe that he can even harbour thoughts of giving up on life.

I am now more convinced than ever that sense pleasures as well as all the trappings of wealth, status and relationships are no sure promises of happiness. Instead we have to train our minds to steer away from unwise perceptions and beliefs that only specific conditions when met can constitute a life worth living. Above all we need to have more compassion for ourselves.

"Our sorrows and wounds are healed only when we touched them with compassion"- Jack Kornfield