Every life is framed by two mysteries. Only one of them, birth, is considered a miracle. If you are a religious person, birth brings a new soul into the world from its home with God. If you are not, the miracle is that a single fertilized cell in a mother’s womb can divide and subdivide a mere fifty times to produce a complete new person. A blob of protein and water somehow knows to shape itself into eyes, hands, skin, and a brain.
This nine-month transformation keeps accelerating, so that by the end a million new brain cells are appearing every minute. At the moment the newborn emerges, like a space shuttle undocking from the mother ship, every system that needs to function independently - heart, lungs, brain, and digestive tract - suddenly realizes that the moment is now and not a moment later. Organs detach from total dependence on the mother, and with astonishing precision they begin to act as if they had always been on their own. In a split second life chooses to live.
The other mystery that occurs, usually decades later, death, is very different. It brings to an end all the things birth struggled so hard to achieve. A thread heartbeat crosses an invisible line and becomes still. The bellows of the lungs, which have pumped some 700 million times, refuse to pump even once more. A hundred billion neurons cease to fire; a trillion billion cells throughout the body receive the news that their mission is over. Yet this abrupt finale is as much a mystery as birth, for at the moment life ends, 99% of our cells are typically still functional, and all 3 billion codons, the individual letters in the book of human DNA, remain intact.
Death comes without the miraculous coordination of birth. Some cells don’t even get the news for some time. If the dead person is revived within ten minutes or so, before the brain gets permanently damaged by hypoxia, the body’s machinery will go back to work as if nothing had happened. Indeed, death is such a blurry event that eyelids can continue to blink ten or twelve times after a head is severed from a body (a grisly fact discovered at the foot of the guillotine during the French Revolution).
Death is something that, on some level, I feel as though every man lives to fight. Looking at the span of a “good” lifetime, ranging wildly from 50 to 100 years upon this planet, no length is significant, notable, recognizable even next to the lengths of our eras, the length of our written history, or very much less the “length” of time. (Please note: the humpty-dumptyism of the previous sentence and its constituents is something I will not tackle here.) Our lives as humans, depending on several factors, including, but certainly not limited to race, gender, finance, geographic location, and familial situation, are composed by everything from fighting wars, to teaching our young; from fleeing persecution, to finding new people to persecute; from eating, drinking, and being merry, to contemplating life’s eternal mysteries; from “wasting” hours with the wonder of the internet, to spending years taking in the sights of the world firsthand; and from studying at universities towards hopeful careers, to spending every waking hour of every day looking for sustenance just to make it to the next.
I believe the very last of those spells it out mostly plainly. Most recognizably. Most succinctly. No matter your situation, your calling, your hopeful destiny, you are waiting on death. Fending it off. You might fear it. You might have been running from it for years, on your way even now to hide out in some mountains for a while. You might be enticed by the prospect, knowing that the greatest extremity from your condition now as… alive, would be to be alive no longer. You might embrace death, “knowing” the promise it has in store for you, enjoying the life you have been granted along the way. I could spend the rest of my days before my own demise, here, at this keyboard, entrusting from a list to http://dinosaureatsman.blogspot.com an individual description of every single way that death is viewed by every mind on Earth, and I would not make it a fraction of the way through. That is one beauty of death to me.
I am not sure just how I would categorize myself according to any certain criteria regarding death’s regard. I do not deny it, but I am perplexed by it. I do fear it, but am not governed by this fear. Rather, I am governed by the very truth this life is endowed with by death’s toll…
As best as I may ever know - and should I have to say, as best I should ever wish to know - this life is all I have. It is the most precious gift imaginable in the scope of all existence, or all that existence ever could be, and though I feel I am truly indebted to no one for it save my mother (as an unavoidable, cosmic, existential life-debt seems far too steep a condition to live with at all), I am thankful for the chance to live it every single day that I do.
I am no one but myself, therefore my assumptions about the rest of humanity around me are free to run wild, yet I can hear someone say, to some effect, “Isn’t it a bit dismal to think of this life and this life alone as all you’ve got, seeing especially as how you’ve just got done explaining at how relatively insignificant it is? Isn’t the promise of everlasting life in heaven a little too much to brush off? Isn’t the perfect union of nirvana something too good to deny? Doesn’t the limitless potential of reincarnation just balance everything out too well to overlook?” My answers to you, whoever you might ever be, are, “No,” “no,” and “no,” respectively. But if you’ll take care and note, I haven’t actually done any brushing off, denying, or overlooking of any sort. No, I have not.
I have no way of knowing what will come at the first minute of my twelfth hour. In fact, I know very little, if anything, of just who I will be when that time does come. What I do know, will know, is what I will have had up to that point. A full and lived life. And after that?
I have never searched for a promise for another life to give reason to this one. To me, that would be cheating this life of what it deserves a priori. I have never spited this life for being the only one I have been given so far. I meet every day, still thankful, hopeful to make an impact on the life someone else has been given to live. They might be living for a totally different reason. Putting forth a different means to a different end. Perhaps even living a totally different life. That I do not know, on a person to person basis, nor could I ever truly come to find out. What I can know, and do take the care to know, is this: I am here. So are you. Be my friend and I will be yours. I will teach you something and you can share something with me, if you want. Let me show you my world and I, with humility and awe, will look upon as much of yours as you will show me.
I believe. I do believe.
I watched “Finding Forrester” tonight and took advice from Sean Connery’s William Forrester. I cracked the spine of a book upon my shelf and let it take me somewhere inside my own head. Once I got there, I committed what I found to this page. The book was “Life after Death: The Burden of Proof,” authored by Deepak Chopra. I have not finished this read, nor come anywhere close, but if I find anything else inside me along my way, I’ll be sure to let you know. The excerpt is in italics above.
I owed you a full review of Coldplay's "Viva La Vida or Death and All His Friends," but I will confess I had fun misleading you, if I did, with the title above. I promise it is coming soon. I am striving to first know the album like the back of my hand.
