Death as an Inspiration for Life

A life well lived, celebrating life and death

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Our lives seem to be a journey from the maternity ward to the crematorium, the moment we're born we're like a fruit that has become ripe and starts the journey of falling off the tree and nothing can be done to stop the fall from continuing and eventually the fruit hits the ground, it's final destination.

But mostly we resist this fall not realizing we can’t do anything about it; I remember sometimes back having a conversation with a certain lady and the question of death arose, she told me she's of course afraid of dying and didn't want to die neither did she want her family members to die too. From this conversation it seemed to me that we in some sense refuse to die not knowing this refusal is only in our heads, we behave as if we can chose it not realizing that to die or not to die is not upon us it us the nature of Being.

Imagine going to sleep and never waking up! It would have been as if you were never alive, you wouldn't know that you have died. I like imagining this alot especially when I wake up in the morning, it's a huge inspiration for life knowing that at this moment I'm alive I could as well have been in an eternal slumber and I wouldn't have known it.

Birth is the moment of waking up after never having gone to sleep and we don't remember the moment before waking up after never having gone to sleep, and dying is going back to that moment before waking up after never having gone to sleep. Sometime when we think of death we think of it as being in a trap in an eternity in which we're conscious of our dead self, but just as when we're asleep we don't know we are asleep until we're awake, when we're dead we will not know we are dead, and so dying is not like being buried alive.

The idea that death can be an inspiration for life in itself sounds absurd because we've been raised in a culture that has taught us from childhood that dying is bad, a culture that only celebrates birth and not death, a culture that avoids even talking about death itself. Seeing our family members frown, cry and become sad upon the news of a dead relative made us know for certain that death is and should be treated as a bad thing.

We don't want to imagine our own death out of the fear of confronting the reality of not being, we're afraid of being conscious of the idea that at some point we will be no more, it could be the next hour, it could be tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, a month from now or years from now. We want to imagine ourselves living for many years despite knowing at the back of our mind that we're always walking and living with death side by side each and every day and any moment could be our last moment.

We resist and refuse to die, we want to hold on to the idea of ourselves that we've created overtime from birth, the idea of “me” my name, my family, my country, my properties, my career, “my life”not realizing that this is just an idea of ourselves that we've formed in our minds over time. The life of the Being was meant to just be pure and simple, to eat from it's natural habitant when hungry and sleep when tired, have sex and produce offsprings just naturally like other forms of life without any forms of attachments to life.

Falling apart is the nature of life and everything is falling apart, nothing is permanent and change is the only constant. From the moment we're born we're always growing physically through eating and whatever we eat becomes us; mentally through learning about ourselves and the world around us, expanding our consciousness in every step of growth; the you of today is not the you of yesterday and neither will it be the you of tomorrow.

Life and death are happening simultaneously, our organism growth seems to incorporate both life and death at the same time; life is more vibrant than death in the beginning when we're young but gradually after the peak of life death starts becoming more vibrant in old age towards the peak of death itself.

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Nothing in the world depends on us being alive, we tend to have this idea of our self-importance that is illusory but in the grand scheme of things we're just another organism like the bees, the birds, and the trees. Tomorrow if we don't wake up life on the planet will continue as if we were never alive to begin with, nothing will change, of course the people that knew the idea of us like family and friends will be sad instead of celebrating our well lived life, but soon too their memories of the idea of the Being we were will fade away.

We tend to have an exaggerated sense of our own self-importance and the importance of the work we're doing when we're alive, “to leave a legacy” they say, but that too is just to satisfy our ego self when we're alive, to kind of want to be remembered as if that will matter and we won't be anywhere to know we're being adored and venerated.

Reflecting upon our own death is not about making us feel empty, without purpose and helpless, but rather to bring us back to ourselves, our forgotten Self; to bring us back to the garden of eden; to open our eyes to the nature of our impermanence and appreciate each and every moment here and now; to help us see the privilege of being alive each and every moment, and enjoy the beauty of life in awe looking at the simple little things that don't matter; to stop being in our own way through holding on to the image and ideas of ourselves and letting go, to allow ourselves to simply be; to see death as an inspiration for life and not an hindrance to life.

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