Death creeps upon us with silent feet. We cannot hide and our minds will not cope properly with our innate knowledge that our time must end. This leads us to the mistaken idea that we will never die. Unless, something unexpected moves us out of the normal track of our grinding daily routine, death will appear unexpected and monstrous before us at the last moment of our miserable existence. As Socrates said, “The unexamined life is not worth living”, and I would add that the unexamined death leads to a worthless life.
Every moment of our short existence leads us that much closer to death, and in turn our body dies incrementally as our time turns by. At times the years seem to roll past as an ocean swell. Time is all around us as transparent as the air we are breathing. As such we never see time, the hourglass flows past us but we are unable to feel the grains of sand build up around us. We strangle and choke on our own mortality and as such refuse to see the obvious. Life is mostly brutal and short, our time is unknowable and as such every moment must be seen as possibly our last, each breath could be the final one of our lives.
Occasionally someone is forced to violently confront the mortality factor and reevaluate how their life is flowing. They realize that the lenses they have been peering out at the world through are only enhancing their myopathy. Our lives lend themselves only to distraction and when forced to peer inward a change in processing occurs. As we grow we learn to uncomfortable with the trappings of death. Our own psyche attempts to save us from the only thing that all living beings share. This is in fact the downfall of self-awareness.
As we evolved to self-awareness our insight into our own condition grew but most of us cannot face it even today. How could primitive man face the knowledge that is both a blessing and curse? As the bible eloquently states the issue, what is preferred innocence or knowledge? As the tree granted knowledge and self-awareness it also stripped away the illusion of eternity, which all humans strive to re-attain. It is an eternal ideal of childhood, that perfect time in our lives, that remains forever timeless and perfect, our personal paradise.
We can never gain back this innocence and to attempt it is futile.
As children time had almost no meaning for us, but flowed away never in short supply. We thought everything was forever, a trip to the dentist or afternoon in the park seemed to be forever, then suddenly it collapses inward and we are adults with a new awareness of time. Rather than deal openly with our mortality we at this point make the choice to cover the knowledge we have gained and conceal from ourselves the truth. At this point the deception begins, we lose sense of our true existence and begin living in a dream world, lost in attempts to either recapture or relive that past innocence.
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