Is something truly dead if it was never alive? And if it were alive, would it not make sense to look at it through the phenomenon of its existence rather than its inevitable death? Don’t we then do ourselves a great disservice by trying to understand our life through its mortality? By trying to make sense of life by coming to terms with death when our endeavour should be the other way round?
We cannot deny the existence of darkness after all, but we understand it better by studying the phenomenon of light. It has been a well held belief by many that music is in the silence between the notes. Any piece of music of course can be defined as an arrangement of short and long silences with notes placed between each silence. However, despite silences being the core of music, its composition can only be accessed by studying the notes that accentuate those silences.
Death is the absence of life similar to how darkness is the absence of life and silence the absence of notes. Each of these absences can inspire their own fears, the fear of the dark, the fear of the eerie quiet and the ultimate fear of death. It has been a cornerstone of civilisation that it has been able to fill the darkness with light and the silence with music. Maybe the next step of our ascendence lies in conquering the fear of death by filling our deaths with life. For conquering a fear of an absence has always meant understanding the meaning of a presence. We understand our fears of abandonment by understanding what meaning we assign to our relationships. We understand our fears of aimlessness by understanding what inspires us.
So must it be with death. In order to come to terms with our deaths, I believe we must first come to term with our lives. Life like a piece of music is a silence accentuated by two notes – birth and death. Both these notes are similar in that they come with a helplessness of a lack of choice. Our wills are non-existent in these notes. We can never hope for a choice of reaction to these events. Life melts into a dichotomy as everything in between these two notes puts an almost unbearable burden of choices on our shoulders. The moment life gives us consciousness it demands we make choices. Choices about how every event and every thought makes us feel and for how long.
One might think it would be helpful to know the purpose of our lives in making these choices, but any purpose to our lives is self-assigned and crumbles at the face of logic. It took trillions of coincidences for us to come into existence. It will take trillions more to decide how we die. How then do we examine our lives amidst this string pulling by an invisible hand which itself might not even be sentient? A pair of hands that might not even exist.
I believe its hopeful to know that our lives have no purpose to begin with. That in a long enough expanse of time, our deaths would be inconsequential too. It means it’s only us, in the now, who are the purpose of our lives. A long enough examination of our lives would reveal that while there are invisible strings being pulled by invisible hands in the form of all those tiny atoms and mighty planets that we can never hope to control, we are not the puppets being controlled. We are each one, our own universes. Our existence is personal. A flicker of light in our minds., And the invisible hands move everything and everyone around us but never us. We are not the puppets, we are the recipients of this performance, we are the spectators of this spectacle, the dance of the universe. The performance moves us of course, just like theatre would, it changes us. But we have the power of the spectator. We decide what the spectacle means to us. We decide which soliloquies move us and which songs make us thump our feet. We choose our heroes; we choose what we admire and what we detest. We have no control of what happens on the stage even though it holds the power to change us deeply. For we do have control on how we choose to receive it. What will make us laugh and what will make us cry. We can pick sides in the story. Imagine the time hidden in between scenes the way we want.
Life is this series of events beyond our control which happen to us as we are burdened with complete control of how we let them affect us. It’s carrying the burden that this liberation brings that is the purpose of our lives. Coming to terms with this burden is coming to terms with life and maybe even the first step towards leading a good one. The dichotomy of no control of the events but complete consciousness that births complete control over how we feel about them is one that might assuage our fears of death too. For death, is an end of the dichotomy. It’s an event that we have no control over and that we won’t be conscious enough to reflect on.
And if death is the end of all choices, then life must be a celebration of our will. A tiny speck on the timeline in which you have control. You are in charge. And why not then must we aspire for greater things? Why not must we make those choices? And if we really are the choosers then why can’t we reflect on every tenet of our lives that we take for granted? Why can’t we reflect on what money means to us? What a career means to us? What does love mean to us? And if this universe is so personal that we are the only spectator and everyone and everything else on stage, then why can’t our answers be our own? Unlike anyone else’s? Life is freedom in its truest sense. It doesn’t merely let us choose what we want to be free from. It let’s us choose what enslaves us.
Leave a Reply