The Shoe That Lasts One Year Author: Gouya Roshan

The Shoe That Lasts One Year

Human beings are creatures guided by plans and arrangements. Our daily lives are filled with “later,” “next year,” “when the time comes,” and “just in case.” We take the future for granted—so much so that we build houses for it, buy insurance policies, and make promises. Yet at the edge of all these certainties stands death; not as an extraordinary event, but as a constant truth, watching this scene with a cold smile.

The image of a man who gives his shoe to a cobbler and says, “Repair it so that it will last for one year,” is simple yet profound.

This sentence captures the essence of the human mind—a mind that assumes survival as something natural. It is not spoken out of pride, but out of habit. We are used to taking life for granted. We are used to believing our bodies are more durable than the things we wear. Yet the bitter irony of life lies exactly here: the shoe lasts for a year, but its owner does not last even a single day.

In this narrative, death does not shout, threaten, or warn. It simply “comes.” And this indifference is more frightening than anything else. While we are busy planning, death does not wait for the right moment; the right moment is always there. Death’s laughter is not mocking, but understanding—an understanding of how much humanity trusts in time and how little it reflects on its own mortality.

This contradiction raises a fundamental question: if the future is not guaranteed, what is the purpose of planning? Perhaps the problem is not planning itself, but how we plan. Human beings construct the future not out of ignorance, but for their psychological survival. Yet when this construction is accompanied by forgetting death, it turns into an illusion—an illusion that distances us from the present, from meaning, and from honesty with ourselves.

Remembering death should not paralyze us or pull us away from life; on the contrary, it can awaken us. Knowing that the shoe we mend today may never be worn again, we can choose our words, our love, our forgiveness, and our way of living more consciously and more deeply. Perhaps instead of spending our lives preparing for an uncertain tomorrow, we should give meaning to tomorrow through today.

In the end, this story is not about death, but about life—a life that, though short and fleeting, is precisely for that reason worthy of reflection, feeling, and living. Death may laugh, but we decide what to laugh at and what to live for.