As humans, we’re aware that we’ll eventually die. Not only that, we know that the people we care about will die, or have died already. Still, we don’t want to deal with it.
As in a crowded room when we avoid a person we don’t want to talk to, we deftly avoid the subject of our death.
Our ancestors who DIDN’T rebuf death don’t have many descendants in our gene pool, so it’s no surprise that, millions of years later, we want to live forever!
I remember feeling, “We HAVE to live beyond our earthly life. Otherwise, in the grand scheme of things, we’re no different than a leaf falling from a tree, landing on the ground, and decomposing back into the earth”.
Then I thought, “Well, what’s wrong with that? We live, we die, we dry up, and then we break down so other life can feed off of us. And I’m comfortable with that”!
Why should our fate be any different than all other living things? Is it because not living forever makes us akin to sun-bleached, dried out roadkill, carelessly run over by people trying to get to work on time?
You are not entitled to live forever. You will die. And do you know what else? You are not entitled to some kind of “after-party”, where the cool people get to go after everyone else leaves.
Your eternal fate is no different than a leaf on a tree, a flattened opossum, a beached, mighty whale, or an exploding star. But this means something beautiful: you are in the Circle of Life!
The Circle of Life is an egalitarian circle, where the decomposing leaf is just as significant as the exploding star.
Whether you like it or not, you too are a Circle of Life denizen.
Many fool themselves into believing that their eternal fate is “greater” than the decomposing leaf. They proclaim that while they are IN this world, they are not OF this world. They believe that their name is written in a book, and that the book is a kind of guest list to a perpetual after-party.
But eternal life is abnormal. Why would someone be exempt from death? Are pets exempt too? What would eternal life even be like? Do people hoping for eternal life even KNOW what their prize will be? Does it make sense to put all of your chips onto one number, then roll the roulette wheel, without even knowing what the payout IS?
It’s arrogant to assume you’ll live forever while the rest of us either cease to exist at best or perpetually burn at worst.
Far from scaring me, knowing I’ll die relieves me of the heavy burden of being “special”. Knowing I’ll die frees me to “just be”.
Knowing you’ll die need not doom you to despair, for as the Night Vale podcast tweeted on January 6, 2015, “Death is only the end if you assume the story is about you”.
No Hell 4 You! 