Once upon a time, I was dead.
When is it the right age to know about death? when did I first understood the fleeting nature of existence? Never in my life, this question occurred to me. Not until this morning when I woke up but stayed in bed for slightly too long as I do every day. I like to take my time then, because it’s the only time I’m left rested and alone with my ideas, unlike the night time when I’m too exhausted to untangle them.
Most of us if not all of us must have learned about death when we’re kids and it’s just not that big of a deal. Maybe we face it once our first pet passes away or when we hear that one of our friend’s grandma died, but we never really take complete hold of it because it’s easy for our parents to embellish anything for us at that age, even the greatly inevitable experience of death.
But what about when our parents no longer have that awesome ability? When we get ever so invested in the path that has already been drawn for us and get involved in the endless loop of hell that is study, work, have kids, and get them into the same loop too just to remain alive? What about when we lose someone or we’re as disappointed in someone as thinking that even human connections are temporary and just another way of survival? Or the moments we stop, stand still in an empty street after we’ve walked miles to distract aggressive emotions and thoughts that sneaked into our heads when we were simply just trying to find a purpose in life other than dying. What should we do when we’re not only fighting an existential crisis that we know is not much more than an acknowledgment that life is absurd, but we’re already in the ugly phase of denial and we know that that exact absurdity needs to be confronted before the denial collapses to create this huge mess our fragile and vulnerable human minds and bodies can’t handle.
The moment we’re born we get thrown at complete chaos and get taught to deny it, that’s if we’re ever being taught something, in most cases we spend our whole lives trying to figure this dilemma of life out while suppressing and ignoring sadness that accumulated throughout the years to end up leaking out of us in other ugly ways.
Should we just admit that birth is a curse and existence is a prison?
I don’t think we should do that as much as we need to stop living life as if death doesn’t exist. We first need to stop calling the instinctive habit of avoiding death, fear. Fear is one thing and avoiding danger is another, fear can take away quality time, it might even cause early death. And regardless of whether we want to admit it, we’re all dead matters moved by the laws of the universe, and we all fear death. The awareness of our impending mortality is one of, if not the most influencing force on our experience of life. The things we do, the thoughts we have, and the feelings we experience. Everything we are is driven by our unconscious nature to stay clear of death, and our conscious awareness of the fact that at some point we will have to face it, just like we must accept it as an essential part of life, with accepting the idea that we already experienced it before and come to terms with the fact that we will experience it again, and be totally and utterly okay.
Understanding the concept of death opens the door to life itself. After facing the simple truth that we’re going to die whether we want it or not, whether we like where we’re going after our death or not, we’re going to be inspired to do interesting things and run after deep fulfillment that drags the expansive feeling of freedom with it, rather than feeling stuck, being anxious over nothing and latching onto material distractions.
Something I read somewhere goes “our bodies and minds are mere rentals gifted to us by the universe for a vacation of conscious, physical existence and at some point, they must be returned, the place in which they return to is the same place in which we received them from”. Even if you believe that your spirit, soul, energy, or whatever you like to call it is infinite, then its infiniteness must go both forward and back. Therefore whatever came before our existence is exactly what will come after our death. In fact, doing it the second time around is only less intimidating than the first.
The thing we should fear the most here is not death itself but not appreciating life while we have it. After all, what is the downside? why shouldn’t we cherish everyday good or bad when we know we’re going to die anyway? In fact, when perfection goes on forever there’s the hedonic treadmill which is the general baseline level of happiness a person experiences over their lifetime, although events and environmental factors can affect happiness in the short term, people will naturally adapt back to their hedonic set point in the long term. That’s why being mortal prevents us from becoming numb, unable to feel the luxury of life. At last, if time stretched out forever we would all be happiness zombies.
