Given the location of my home and that I must drive every day to work and/or school, I spend a lot of time in my car alone with my thoughts. Naturally, my mind wanders as I head down the highway. At night, as I'm driving, I often drive faster, because I want to be home relaxing sooner. However, I very rarely wear my seatbelt, the way they are set up in my car, and my physical build, causes the seatbelt to cut into my neck painfully, and leaves a sore spot after I'm done driving; so, hating the confinement of seatbelts anyway, that's all the more motivation I need not to wear one. It occurs to me while driving that some animal, perhaps a deer, could roam onto the road and cause me to wreck. My mind then turns to what exactly would happen to me if such a situation were to occur. I would be hurt, definitely, but would I die? And how bad would I be hurt? What would I do? Would I regret not wearing the seatbelt? Or would it really make that much difference? Would my cell phone be close enough and would I be uninjured enough to call anyone for help? How frequently do cars come by if I can't call for help? How much pain and disfigurement could I deal with in order to live? How strong would my will to live be?
I don't know any of the answers, and any answers I think I might know are actually only pure speculation. However, once I'm done thinking of all these questions without answers, I wonder what it would be like to die. Would it be peaceful, or would I be full of anxiety? I hope if I'm to die, it's peaceful, since I can't see the point in getting worked up about something over which I have no control. What will it be like when the light fades out of my eyes? Will it be like falling asleep after a very long day? Will there be something on the other side of this consciousness? Or will everything I've ever been and thought simply fade with the wind? The idea that there's something on the other side, some sort of afterlife seems to preposterous as to be laughable. And yet, the idea that there is a race of humans running around observing the natural world, trying to figure out what makes it tick, and calling it science and learning and respecting it so much, seems equally laughable. For that matter, the fact that there are conscious beings living and making decisions of their own volition, despite however instinctual various creatures may be, seems beyond preposterous. The universe would be a much simpler place if all interactions were chemical and carried out by inanimate objects all along, and Occim's razor would point to such. The idea that, in a Universe that takes eons to truly create or destroy anything, we bloom into existence and are extinguished just as suddenly, is what's truly preposterous; yet here we are. And what about the intangible things? Things like honor, integrity, goodwill? These are human constructs of course, but at what point does anything become more than the sum of its parts? When does cellular life, chemical signals, and electric current become a human? When does that human become a person with a personality, distinguishable from any other person? What about intrinsic things? Love? Emotions relate to chemical signals, but doesn't comprehension of reality trigger these emotional-chemical signals? Aren't concepts like love more than the sum of their parts? The idea that all of this fades in the blink of an eye? Surely that must also be preposterous, no?
Given all these unlikelihoods, the fact that there is this notion called life at all and that this life is finite, how unlikely is the possibility that it doesn't end with the demise of this mortal coil? Cells live and die in our body constantly, synapses in our brains fire electric sparks, and yet there is an over arching theme called human that acts and thinks with consciousness beyond what a cell could possibly imagine, even had they imagination. It may be wishful thinking on my part to want something, anything, on the other side, but that doesn't mean I'm wrong. Wishing for someone to love you back, or for situations to go well for you doesn't preclude the possibility that these things can, or will, or will not, happen.
And if there is nothing but this life, why are we wasting it learning anything more than what's basic to our survival? How ridiculous is that, wasting years of one's life, years that can't be gotten back, in the pursuit of knowledge and learning? If this is the only life we have, shouldn't our commitment be to living it rather than learning about it? We're all Faust in this case, only some of us never realize the foolishness in wasting our time learning. I'm all for improving oneself, but not at the cost of putting one's life on hold to live later, after the studying is done. And is the studying every really finished? At what point can you say, "Ok, I've learned enough, time to live my life."? I study history, I learn about the ways people who came before lived, the ways they built their lives up around them. It's taught me that it all fades with time, and the convictions that held a society together, can and do change, or fade away. Everything important that we seek to preserve eventually disappears, it is all of it fleeting and relative. Living, however, does not. It's the one constant throughout all of this. People, animals, life, continue to live and interact, it is the overarching static constant. People interacting, the ways they treat each other, that's what's important and passed on. It's among the briefest things, but also most enduring because it's constantly being repeated, rejuvenated, and passes into the future even as we live it. It takes the Sun's light approximately 8 minutes to reach the Earth. When we look up at it, we aren't seeing the Sun, we're seeing 8 minutes into the past to what and where the Sun was. How many milliseconds are we living in the future actually, compared to the time it takes us to comprehend and live our lives in the immediate past?
Everywhere I see the paradoxes and pointlessness of life and lives, organic organisms bumbling about in the fields and hills, running amok on a blue ball in the midst of vast and dark emptiness, barely removed from an ongoing nuclear reaction eons in the making and enduring, and yet, here we are. How ridiculous are our lives when viewed from that kind of perspective scope? You think that math test matters in the morning? Or that bit of money you're returned for investing your time at work? Of course it matters, existence is existence, and cannot be denied, if it exists it must be equally important. The secret is if everything is equal, then it's a static and unmoving existence, but existence, life, is not fair, there's something in motion. Why? With as ridiculous as our lives are, we must surely live them, and I like to think we should keep an open mind about the next step, whatever it may be. Life is for the living, for the living of it. Death cannot be the end, even if we don't understand the next step, it must only be the end of the beginning.
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