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"
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