What Is To Be Done?

By Pernickety Precilla

What Is to Be Done? is a well-known treatise penned in the early twentieth century by Vladimir Lenin, leading light of the so-called socialist revolution in Russia. It dwells on what its author thought needed to be done in the context of the revolution that he was seeking to spearhead. The book went on to achieve the status of one of the most important Marxist classics.

‘What Is To Be Done?’ is actually a perennial question, one that presumably each one of us asks at least sometime in our lives. It is not something specific to Lenin and to his fellow Marxists whom he sought to instruct through the book he wrote which bears this question as its title. At many points in our life, many of us ask ourselves: ‘What Is To Be Done?’—for instance, on occasions when we need to take an important decision and do not know what to decide. Some of us may even ask ourselves this question in the larger context of our life as a whole—in the context of what can be called ‘the macro-purpose of our life’—desperately wanting to know what it is that we need to do with our life itself. ‘What Is To Be Done With This Life We Have Been Given?’ we might want to know.

Unlike Lenin’s devoted followers, many of whom may have considered him as the unchallengeable source to know ‘What Is To Be Done’, many of us recognize no such external authority to instruct us what to do in situations when we do not know what to do but that demands a decision that we do something.

On such occasions, we need to take such decisions ourselves.

While being able to take decisions ourselves, not having some Lenin-like figure to tell us what we must do, might be a great freedom, there is no guarantee that any decision that we take independently, on our own, will actually turn out to be a good and wise one. We have no idea of what the final outcome will be of a decision we make using our own volition, based on our own intellect and feelings. Often, such decisions can prove to be counterproductive for us.

This being the case, in such situations ‘What Is To Be Done?’, we might ask.

From a theistic perspective, there is really a very simple answer to this seemingly very difficult conundrum. When in doubt as to what is to be done at a particular juncture of our lives, when we do not know what decision to take on a certain matter or even when we have not the faintest idea as to what to do with our lives as such, all we need to do is turn to our Creator, our Divine Parent, present our issue before Them and request Them to tell or guide us as to what to do with regard to the matter at hand.

Now, it may not be highly likely that in response to this request we will hear an audible voice booming from out of the clouds on high telling us exactly what we need to do, but it is certainly very likely that if we wait silently in anticipation of a reply, our Divine Parent will answer our query very soon, in the form of thoughts that They may put into our minds—or, in other words, through the Inner Voice that each one of us has been given. The guidance provided by the Inner Voice may then be Our Divine Parent’s telling us ‘What Is To Be Done’ in the matter that we have presented before Them and for which we have sought Their guidance.

Really, getting to know ‘What Is To Be Done’ when we have no idea what it is that we need to do can be as simple as that!