Because we don’t know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, an afternoon that is so deeply a part of your being that you can’t even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four, five times more, perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps 20. And yet it all seems limitless.
a quote from the book ” The Sheltering Sky” by Paul Bowles that stuck with me since I’ve first read it.
Accepting that death is inevitable is personally one of the hardest things: As far as I remember I carry a feeling between the polarities of experiencing life as hard and often meaningless, while also being hungry for everything life has to offer, so I can’t help but to always return to a search for a personal meaning.
Our society dictates norms, pressures and expectations on how we should learn, love and work. The more I think about it, the more flaws emerge in this way of thinking from my point of view. While visiting a graveyard yesterday I couldn’t help but notice how there were all this names from deceased individuals with mostly unpersonalized exchangeable graves, that give no clue on the lives the people had, before this was their final destination.
Who are those people? How did they lived? What do they regret? My list of questions is endless. While being there I’ve imagined how it would be to read my name or names of people close to my heart on those tombstones and I was scared, how my subjective feelings differed from how irrelevant any death of a living creature really is from a birds eyed view. No one really cares for whom except some people close to you and the word relevance with its inherent meaning is just derived from our human-centric framework. If our society would accept the same consciousness that is universal to all living forms, that everything is just temporary and fleeting, like liquid water running through fingers, that the future is just the yesterday of tomorrow, how much would we reevaluate what it means to have a life well lived, how much would we treat the ones around us differently and how much of a f*ck would any give on money, others opinions on us, status and material possessions?
Individual lives in itself are meaningless in a biological framework yet your personal experience of existing is meaningful and the only thing, everyone really owns. Everything ends and with that in mind, what will change when you put this notion into every decision you make from now on?
