Tuesday, February 28, 2012

They all hurt, the final kills

Time. It is the harbinger of Death. It is omnipresent, unrelenting yet silent. We know it's always there, but sometimes we can forget; for just a while, we can forget its presence.

There's so much that can be said of time. It's such a passive thing. It doesn't do anything. Only recently have we given it a dimension, but unlike the other three that we can touch, it just washes over us. It is a curious thing. And for everything, the more time experienced, the closer to ceasing to exist it is.

Endings are something dear to me. Most of the time they suck. Breaking up with a friend, losing a parent, dropping a glass, wrecking a car, they suck. Often, endings signal the potential for something to change. Sometimes the change is good. Sometimes it's bad. But, always, change is an adventure. A new experience. Something to learn from -- even if that lesson is fear.

I like change. I fear change. As with most of reality, I have a complex relationship with change. And what is the biggest change of all? Death. Death fascinates me to no end. I ponder it quite regularly.

I'm sure you must be imagining me as some kind of morbid uber-goth surrounded by dozens of black candles. Quite the contrary. I'm an ostensibly normal guy. I just like death. It's finality is paradoxical. Everything else in existence has a certain measure of permanence. While a building will crumble or a star will collapse, the component parts of those structures will continue to exist and go on to become something else. When something dies, it goes away. Well, something stops being there. What once could exert its will upon reality is no longer capable.

Perhaps I'm being arrogant or presumptuous. Maybe, what I'm seeing as an immutable consciousness is only the outward result of a complex series of chemical reactions not unlike the way photons are a product of the thermonuclear reactions in a star. When the fuel is depleted, the spark fades.

Obviously, I don't accept that. I experience faith. Intuitively, at least to me, I know that there no finality to death. The consciousness goes on. Death isn't grim; he's just really busy getting everyone to where they need to be next.

This was how I pondered some of my earliest feeling about reality that eventually led me to paganism.

No comments:

Post a Comment