Friday, September 23, 2016

Giving Mortality its Due

Scattered about our house are the many family photographs capturing fleeting moments in the lives of parents, grandparents, great grandparents, grandchildren, dear friends etc.  These moments are mostly around happy and sometimes joyous occasions but also reflect times of sadness and deep distress – the aspects and nuances that life is ordinarily made up of.

In my mind, they represent the comings and goings of the generations within this fleeting apparition called life.  Most of us walk around secretly – and sometimes not so secretly – terrified of the ineluctable fact that in some future time, one of our loved one will be gazing upon our image in some dusty photo album or embedded in the memory of a smartphone or if we are truly blessed hanging on a wall and nurturing some short-lived thought about who we were when we were alive.  Hopefully they will be mostly pleasant memories.

Yes, one day I will cease to exist – the journey officially and precisely complete.  That is the way of it – what we were born to accomplish.  One may take solace in the absurd idea that after death, though our body begins the transient process of its disintegration, we somehow magically go on for eternity no less.  One may choose to blunt reality in any number of ways.  But, no matter, these kind of choices change nothing.  These are not benign conclusions, for they blunt the believer’s capacity to live and to appreciate the ephemeral beauty that is afforded to us as sentient beings.
  

We could live in a much saner, much happier world if we would only evolve past these childish notions, live our lives fully and encompass and cherish everyone, everything and embrace all of it while we still breath.

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