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The Quick and the Dead Death. It terrifies and fascinates both me, and the majority of the rest of the world's population. Religions seem to be focused on the subject to the point of obsession. Which seems reasonable, considering its importance. Because if you're not scared of death, you're not alive. You can't possible be. Not in any real sense. Death is the end. Even if you say you believe in an afterlife, are you really that sure? And are you sure you're going someplace pleasant, and not to the post mortem equivalent of Hamilton? The likelihood of any good coming of dying seems vanishingly small from where I'm sitting. At best, it's the end of everything good (even leaving aside my admittedly irrational belief that the world will end at the point of my death). Nothing good can come of death. It's scary shit. And it's coming for all of us. Sooner or later, possibly the only thing in life that you can be sure of is that you'll die. We deal with this by either ignoring it or telling ourselves comforting lies, or more often still, a combination of both. Well fuck that. The fact of my own inevitable death is information, and it's inevitably a mistake to so carelessly discard information, let alone replace it with untruths. The only option is to embrace it. To embrace death. Yeah, you heard me. Embrace the truth: you're going to die. It's inevitable. It's going to happen. There's not a fucking thing you can do about it. You have to understand this to be alive, because you have to understand this to realize how precious every last breath is. This life is all you've got. There is no more. So enjoy it. Seize the fucking day not because there may not be a tomorrow, but because there is no tomorrow. But this is not about nihilism or hedonism, as some would have you believe. Just because our actions do not determine our place in some eternal never-never land, does not mean they have no consequences in the here and now. You want to enjoy life? Then you're going to want to live someplace nice. So act with compassion, with consideration, with caring and love. And hope that others do. Because if we want to enjoy this one brief life we have, we'll need a world worth living in. --Hewligan |
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