Death: Day 46

[B] Friend, foe, or foible? (46,343 / 1,000,000)

Curiosity killed the cat, so they say. Satisfaction, however, brought it back.

In every quiet café, under every stone, in the words of every book, death lurks. Not the kind that snatches your breath from your lungs, nor the kind that leaves a glassy-eyed corpse behind, but a different death. This kind of death comes for smaller (or larger) things than a measly human. Every day we stride through life, we are simultaneously wading through torrents of death. Don’t let all this talk of death scare you away, I promise this is not that kind of tale. Some of us treat death like an ominous shadow in the corner; a presence we are all aware of, but which we cannot face, for fear that we may draw its attention. I truly hope that we can kill this perception of death, and in the wake of death’s death, come to a new understanding of it.

Allow me to persuade you that you love death.

Life would be much harder to manage without death. Let us shove aside the seemingly paradoxical thought of life existing without death. Life as we know it, human experience, would be much more difficult without death. I don’t mean only the big ‘D’ Death – the big Kahuna whom waits for us all. Even the tiny deaths we undergo throughout our big ‘L’ Lives are a source of immense meaning for us all. Maybe especially the tiny deaths.

When Thursday turns to Friday and we sense the week beginning to wane, do we not all feel a budding excitement begin to sprout in our chests? The death of the week, and thus the birth of the weekend, may be the most celebrated of all deaths since we started dividing time up into neat little boxes and calling them days, weeks, months, and so on. Few things make us happier than the corpse of Friday laying at the feet of Saturday, I would wager.

Our affection for dead days extends beyond the days themselves. Have you ever been glad a day was over, glad to welcome the sweet embrace of sleep? That’s you kissing the self of that day goodbye, and sending it off to Valhalla (or wherever), only to wake up the next day a new person. Sure, there is some through-line between Monday’s self and Tuesday’s self. Memories, for example: faint ghosts of yester-selves which haunt our thoughts and try to convince us that we are indeed one continuous person, plodding along. Is there anything less worthy of belief than something our own minds desperately want us to believe?

There are painful deaths, to be sure, lurking among the gentle ones. Deaths that you don’t want, and resulting births that you didn’t ask for. There are times when we experience something that changes us forever. The person we were before - the perspectives we held, our beliefs and identities, all evaporate in those moments, and a new person is born. A new self with beliefs radically different than those which we clung to so dearly not moments ago. Those deaths can be uncomfortable to traverse, though who we become after can be greater, not less, than who we were before.

Deaths, small and large, dance around and with us. What can we do with this information? Well, as you may already intuitively know, we have no control over deaths of any kind. We cannot control when, like a bolt of lightning, an idea surges into us, killing the person we once were. Nor can we control even one iota of the immense, cosmic flurry which sows destruction all around us. What we can control, however, is birth. Creation is the fabric spun from the threads left behind by death, and humans can sew like a motherfucker.

When we wake in the morning, what do we have at our disposal other than the raw materials left behind by the death of our yester-self? Our circumstances, opportunities, physical possessions, relationships, and beliefs are all included in the will that we left ourselves from yesterday, and we are the sole inheritors. There may be some items in that will which we do not wish to keep, and we are not obliged to do so, though we may have trouble letting some of them loose. Other items from our inheritance, that which we value about our past selves, we can keep. We can build on them, and pass them on to our next selves, to see what awesome things they may make of them.

There’s not much doing, I imagine, that can be done from the words I wrote here. Where one can’t do, one can only think, and where one thinks… Well, that’s where the problems start. If action is the death of inaction, then thinking is the death of understanding. Don’t think too hard about that analogy, I think it will die upon closer scrutiny.

There is a satisfaction, I mean, of understanding that extends beyond our ego’s ability to fathom the thoughts themselves. There is beautiful consistency all around us that we effortlessly understand: symmetry, cooperation, flow. When we understand without thinking, we can put off death for a time and live in that moment, unchanging. Or at least we can always try.

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Thank you for reading and supporting my work. A year came and went almost without my notice, and looking back on this year of writing has restructured my way of thinking (that’s two deaths for the price of one). I have some changes coming down the pipeline – nothing too drastic, those of you who keep coming back to read can continue to expect much of the same scattered stream of consciousness that you’ve come to love(?). Thank you again, truly, and as always…

Totally nailed it,
Michael