Life after Life: Why do we belive....

As anyone who has read one of these blogs from time to time will have realised, along with being products of a generally aimless, wandering mind, they quite often they seem to focus on, well, why we are here and what's it all about anyway. One of those subjects involves our preoccupation with the afterlife and how, through our countless different cultures, we have constructed very elaborate belief systems that set this all out for us. It's almost as if we have hired artists, who, on the mighty canvas of our collective minds, have painted wonderful, beguiling, and comforting scenes whose grand purpose is to lay to rest our fears of the unknown (and unknowable) and to divert our thoughts away from that stark and very real possibility that, in so far as our lives are concerned, there is no “after” the here we are now living.

 

So why have we developed this conviction that, at the time we depart this mortal coil, our deaths are doorways to what is to be an endless (and perfect) after-life? Where did this after-life idea come from?

 

Is it perhaps routed in our fear of the forever; one that will be without us?

It is a fear grounded in our ability to comprehend the briefness of our own lives, that merciless realisation that we are temporary whilst eternity is not.

 

Our ability to comprehend the passage of time and our tenure within it means, perhaps uniquely amongst all living creatures, we have a deep comprehension of our own mortality. To perhaps numb ourselves from this and all that it entails, we have developed an alternative narrative; namely that when we die, we don't really. Our belief systems and rituals assume now that we go on to somewhere else where we carry on living, just this time, forever. That feels much better.

 

Most us us (but not all), sensibly accept that our tenure on this sand grain suspended in space and time, is infinitesimally brief. However rather than accept that this may be all the “life” we get, we put the very probable reality of this predicament to one side. Instead, our journeys into the nothingness of forever are tempered with imagined lands and places, sunlit with the smiles of our loved and departed, all gathered there and waiting to greet us in some magic world that we have been assured, since our childhoods, is as much a certainty as one day following another. In these places, forever shrinks down in its size to something that we fondly imagine instead being a long happy time that carries on and on, like a fading sepia-tinged memory of those seemingly endless days of long summer holidays from childhood. Eternity's truly remorseless, harrowing scale is instead seemingly contained within the comforting white picket fences of our imaginations, it's harshness ameliorated with our enduring beliefs that, eventually, soon even, all will be well. All we need do it believe it will be so.

 

Why then do we fear death?

 

Because doubts linger? It's there in those emotionally wrenching moments when we must comfort those nearest and dearest to us in the last moments of their lives. For, as our own parents and loved ones pass on from us, before our very eyes, so we must confront the cold reality of our own mortality. No fables or parables can disguise or mask this reality if we are honest with ourselves. It is at such moments we realise that the sweet beguiling comfort we have embraced has blinded us to such an important life-truth: "Your life is about a journey, not a destination". In that sense, we are only passengers with a temporary ticket to travel; there are no permanent seat holders on this ride.....

 

Yet time's vast span means little to these beliefs of ours. We do not understand it. We do not comprehend scale. It's means little to tell the fervently convinced that in a hundred trillion years all the stars that ever were and ever will be, will have burned away into nothing but scattered dust and the universe will be a black immeasurably vast cold place, void of light, life and heat and whose rendezvous is with emptiness alone.  What would it be like to spend this length of time in the so called heavens and paradise of our beliefs? We do not, and cannot imagine, for all things shrink away into virtual nothingness when set against such vast and withering scale. Perhaps we can dimly start to see ourselves truly for what we are?

 

Sometimes we turn to and take comfort from our Gods; we wrap ourselves up in the beauty and comfort of verse and parable that has endured over small centuries, imagining it as an armour against the vastness of infinite time. We imagine to feel the heat of faith dissolving our doubts about the great borderless frontiers of an expanding forever. Yet know this. Life and lives do not endure across these spans of time. Like our civilisations, our Gods too are for a few millennia at the most; they either morph or gather dust, along with the civilisations that called them forth in this endless cycle. They are products of time, place and map reference, although their interlocutors no doubt always have, and always will, declare otherwise. We see this, time after time after time, in the slow rolling wheel of historical fate.

 

So enjoy all the days in the journey of your life, for it is unique amongst all the journeys that have ever been or ever will be lived. There has never been another like you who has lived the life you lead. Your ticket tells you where and when your trip began on his strange train of life. Yet, it never tells you the secret and sudden future destination at which you must disembark, often unannounced and always alone, with no option of a return trip. It has been ever thus. So, instead of preparing for this moment, look to the windows, and enjoy the scene. Get to know your fellow passengers and immerse yourself in their stories and journeys. Celebrate the marvel of love and friendship and the warm glow of your life’s memories, revel in your moment of living and, to paraphrase  Etienne de Grellet, be kind to all those you meet along the way, for we do not pass this way again......

 

 

 

The moral of the story is, you get one life, so do it all.

"Bobby ‘Axe’ Axelrod"

 

Artisan Teas, Sparrow's eggs and other trivia....

“Would you like an Artisan tea”, he asked me?  Blimey. You mean to tell me that artisans have their own tea of choice now? I mean, we've all heard of artisan bread, right. So, perhaps this is what you're supposed to drink whilst eating your artisan bread sarnie. Doubt it though, not at that price.   It was one of those rather poncy pyramid shaped tea bags too, to maximise diffusion, so I'm reliably informed. Perhaps it was designed by an ancient Egyptian architect who worked for a pharaoh and, in between building the world’s largest tombs, found a novel way of adding a little delicate flavouring to the otherwise bland waters of the Nile?

 

It seems that teas go by profession or trade these days, what with Builders' tea a traditional favourite with construction workers so they say,  being a strong cuppa brewed in a mug with a tea bag. Its no doubt not dissimilar to Sergeant Major’s brew (one so strong that the spoon should stand up in it unaided, so my old man used to say) and which should be dispensed at twice boiling point from of a large brightly polished tea urn. It should then be gulped down at a throat scalding temperature (pain is for civvies) between blood curdling roars of fury directed at poor souls gasping their last on Satan’s very own parade ground. 

 

Doubtless Doctors and other medical practitioners automatically prefer a more genteel experience, and are inclined towards that expanding universe of medicinal "herbal" teas. I tried one once; it was nettle infusion tea, meant to be good for hay fever. It smelt of old grass cuttings, you know the ones kept in a warm shed for too long. It tasted even worse. Hay fever was preferable.

 

What about teachers, or do they prefer whiskey (queue gales of laughter please at this prime example of distilled wit). Doubtless something of a more soporific nature to help them while away those long school holidays.   What about chemists? Perhaps a memorable mixture of leaves and other naturally brewed psychotropics.  It could be well worth trying in these politically stressful times for all of us.....

 

Restaurant and pub menus are often another unintended source of mirth. Saw one the other day in a pub; it was a Sunday roast, and the pork proudly declared itself to be “hand carved”.  I imagined some machete-wielding AI out back slicing up the roast pigs with atom like precision except on Sundays. For a Sunday treat however, the pork was being carved by a human – perhaps an award winning sculpture? Relief all round especially for the pig no doubt - at least that job hasn't been automated by a Google designed robot….

 

The biggest joke on the menu however was that claim made by those old staples under the "traditional meals" section, namely, of course, The Pies!  All insisted they were home-made, conjuring up quaint images of the publican's wife (sorry, "partner") applying some special recipe passed down by word of mouth for generations and rolling the pastry, hand prepared only minutes before, with one of those old rolling pins that your mum used to keep in the kitchen. All these fanciful illusions are cruelly dispelled the moment said home-made pie arrives, in the generic white baking dish and super-heated to the point it’s almost undergoing nuclear fission. The pastry crumpled and flaking like layers of burnt newspaper, threatens to blow away if you so much as prod it with a fork. Underneath all of this, the pie’s “contents" are a glutinous molten lava soup bereft of recognisable or edible solids save for the odd faded pea and shrivelled survivor of diced carrot. So much for home made.

 

One last anecdote.  I remember stopping for breakfast once in a Little Chef (big mistake), one of those road side Michelin starred temples to motorway haute cuisine. In a mad fit of over-expectation I order scrambled eggs on toast. Let’s overlook the fact the toast was no more at best than barely warm bread, the portion of scramble looked like it had been conjured up from out of a single sparrow's egg. Curious as to its miniaturised avian origin, I asked the immensely tired and monumentally disinterested waiter why the scrambled nano-egg portion was so small. He lethargically went off to check with the so called "chef" returning with the biologically illuminating feedback that that was all you got in the packet!  Well, well, and there I was thinking all my life that scramble was made from an egg that came in a shell laid by a hen.  Never trust what they teach you at school.
 

Thank the stars I didn't ask for any bacon....