So I've been thinking... Don't worry. It's okay, really. I do that at times. It's no big deal. So I've been thinking about death, and... Hey, where you going??? Eh, that's okay. Death's a tricky subject, and a touchy one, given the plethora of ideas humans have come up with and will frequently, fervently, defend to the (dare we say) death. It's not comfortable to contemplate the end of our existence. I certainly don't like doing it. And yet I do. Go fig. In any case, I found myself pondering the deep thoughts, which I tend to do way more than is probably good for me, and certainly way more than is necessary. But at least I'm not alone; guess it's just what we humans do. We're wacky like that. I'm going to chime in this blog with such deep thoughts from time to time, so have patience and bear with me... So. Without further ado: today's short essay on deep thoughts... Each of us is our own universe: home and host to a wide variety of organisms, each of which, in turn, makes up "we"; and each of which, more than likely, has no idea they are such a tiny part of something bigger: something that simultaneously regards them as both important and inconsequential to its everyday existence. Is this also the situation for humans? Might each of these interlocking galaxies (or, even, universes) be akin to cells? Regardless of whether or not the above is true (and we are unlikely ever to find out), our lives seem, from all available evidence (defined here as that which we can perceive with our senses), woefully inconsequential. What "matters" matters only to our species; even the other living creatures don't bother thinking about it much. Which perhaps might be the wisest course. So, it is only for ourselves, as a collective whole, this seething mass of humanity, that we must live at all. Because, basically, the rest of the universe doesn't seem to give a shit what we do. Death is terrifying. An ever-present spectre that hovers silently over us all. And yet, according to science, life itself was the inventor of death. At some point in time, cells discovered that it was a better idea to reproduce sexually instead of asexually; with new offspring constantly coming along, there was no point in keeping the old. Otherwise, we would have run out of room very quickly; and why keep the old if the new was, hopefully, an improvement? (Were the earliest cells Americans?)
Without death, we would have no escape. Not only would overpopulation be a serious problem (not that it isn't), but it is entirely possible we would see life as having no meaning whatsoever. Immortality as an option sounds very good; but after the first few hundred years, would we feel the same? We could learn all that we have to know, and exist in a Tolkien elf-like state, wise, superior, and bored. We might even decide to take our own lives out of sheer desperation. Living forever does not seem like an option most humans would be able to deal with. With a shortened lifespan, our focus is narrowed; confronting our own mortality forces us to regard what we have as precious, and to hopefully treat it as such. Keeping our species alive as a whole in the manner that we do, passing the baton through generations, with death as an inevitable byproduct; this might be the best of all possible options. We don't have to like it; we do have to, as it were, live with it.
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Rebecca FrohlingWriter, dancer, actress, mother, me. Archives
February 2019
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