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Current mood:  sick
I had a very funny feeling the other day while walking across campus. Lately I’ve taken to noticing the wildlife that lives on the campus, namely squirrels and all types of birds. Yet in watching the wildlife the other day, I was struck with a strange feeling of mortality – that everything dies, and what remains is nothing. And I understood why people cling desperately to the thought of an immortal soul.
As humans, everything we are is a huge investment of time and money. Someone somewhere invested a lot to see us through into adulthood, be it our parents, relatives or the taxpayers. And in between birth and now are irreplaceable experiences and memories that make us uniquely us, things that if we were to make an exact clone of ourselves today, it still would not, could not be us. True that there are genetic personality predispositions, but it is the sum of our experiences that forms the bulk of who we are.
I had an epiphany many many years ago, as a teenybopper, when dutifully serving time as an altar girl at a Catholic Church in my neighborhood. I never really could get myself to believe in god or heaven or anything else, but I tried nevertheless to entertain the possibility. Until one day, while listening to the deacon give the gospel, I stood upon the altar, clad in a white vestament, standing with expected reverence, when I locked my knees. I saw the church start to darken, darken, darken, then pitch black. A second later, my parents had me outside the church and I was suddenly awake. But the period of time from my having fainted to the time my parents brought me outside was all gone. There was nothing, no perception of the passage of time, just minutes lost in the blink of an eye. It was then that I finally understood death. Death would be the same as fainting except there would be no waking. Everything just ceases without even the consciousness of knowing that it ceased.
And given all this, as I walked across campus the other day, I confess I was gripped with a bit of fear when I thought that all of that, every last bit of who and what we are ends with the last breath and the last heartbeat. Everything that is us is formed by mere chemical reactions in the brain, and when those cease, so do we. We can never be here again, the moment, once lost, can never be relived. There is no time machine, no reincarnation, and no heaven above. So what does that leave for us poor mortals?
That we should live for today, we should write, make, create, think, do, cherish the moment, and live each day with the desire to create an immortality of memories that lingers on in those left behind after our time has passed.
9:32 PM
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