I'm learning to appreciate death as an inevitability.
Recently, I was thinking about how short my life is - the fact that I'll be gone in maybe 60 or 70 years, probably less.
Thinking about death helped bring some things into perspective; for instance, the purpose of my being here on Earth in the first place.
Over the last few months, I've been worried about seemingly trivial things. The sort of things I imagine every twenty-something-year-old thinks about:
1. When and how they'll buy their dream house and dream car, and how we somehow always default to preposterously huge monstrosities.
2. How to accumulate power and influence.
3. How to make a billion dollars, and so on and so forth.
I presume these are the sorts of things that young men and women worry about.
And then it dawned on me: didn't Alexander of Macedonia have similar grand dreams? Dreams of conquering the world with Bucephalus and the backing of his mighty army!
Didn't he dream of purging foreign lands and taking the spoils; gold, concubines, and slaves for himself? Didn't he dream of unlimited power?
And yes, he got all of it, or most of it. But so what? In the end, he died.
Didn't Napoleon Bonaparte dream the same dreams? When he fought in the Battle of Marengo and crushed the Austrian forces. He did the same at Austerlitz, defeating the Austro-Russian army and contributing to the collapse of the Holy Roman Empire. He became master of Europe, emperor to millions.
On and on the list goes:
Caesar Constantine Rockefeller Carnegie Peter the Great Mansa Musa
All these men had great ambitions. They did what mere mortals couldn't. They were gods reincarnate.
But they were ALL humbled by the silencing blow of death. They met the same fate as slaves and paupers living in the gutters.
Death has no respect for rank, nobility, greatness, or creed.
IT SILENCES ALL WITHOUT FAIL!!
It is, as I have come to learn, the one true inevitability of the human condition.
But I still can't help but be fearful. Fearful because everything I have come to love, hold dear, and cherish will one day perish.
It's a funny thing, you see, how humans cling to these silly notions and ideologies. Family, romance, love... We care so much about these abstractions that the thought of losing any of them paralyzes us with fear.
We fear losing our loved ones and family to this cruel master: death. We fear that death will rob us of our mothers' fluffy pancakes or our lovers' beautiful smiles.
Yes. I fear. I have no shame in this.
I am fearful of the fact that all my hard work won't mean much in 100 years. I fear that my name will be nothing more than a whisper in the middle of a storm.
I am fearful of coming to an end. The end of experience.
It sucks that I don't believe in an afterlife or in souls. Because then, I'd at least have some solace, some hope that there was something else after.
I know that if what “I AM” comes to an end, only darkness and nothingness await me on the other end.
The thought of my body decaying and turning into termite breakfast makes me shudder. I won't hear birds chirping through my bedroom window anymore. I won't ever feel the touch of a beautiful woman or taste well-aged whiskey burning my tongue, stomach, and intestines.
IT'S ALL VERY SAD TO THINK ABOUT.
None of us can escape death, so I see no need to waste our energy denying its existence.
Sure, it's a bit sad to think about, but I don't think anyone should claim to understand life if they don't understand the sad bits of life too.
You know, it's like self-knowledge. You can't really know yourself if your only concern is your virtues: how kind, loving, or humble you are.
To truly know yourself, you also have to understand the ugly bits: hate, anger, envy...
I hope to one day understand all this.
Why are we here? Where did we come from? What's the point of all this?
Is it just a game? And if so, does death mean GAME OVER?