Life and All That

I thought for a change I would write about something straightforward which I could just sail through and not have to think too hard about. So I drew up a shortlist of two topics: LIFE and the UNIVERSE. As I couldn't make up my mind between them, I tossed a coin and it came up heads, which was 'life'. So there you have it, 'life' it is.

So let's jump in at the deep end and ask the question: what is this condition we call 'life'? I mean, what is it? Well, frankly it's anyone's guess! But whatever it is, one thing’s for certain: we cling onto it for dear... life! Well, we would wouldn’t we? And another thing: without it, there is NOTHING else. Whatever the precise nature of the condition, it is a PRECONDITION for every other condition.

And it doesn’t have to be good and pleasurable for us to want it and want to hang on to it. It can be bad as bad can be, but we still want to keep it. Essentially, it is the Operating System on which all our programs sit, and if our OS conks out, our computer stops working. But unlike a computer, there’s no fixing our OS once it has broken down.

All of us (well, almost all of us) want to live and to live for as long as we can. It makes no odds if we’re old as Methuselah, chronically ill, or intensely unhappy, we still desperately hang on to life for the sake of ... hanging on to life. And we do it because we cannot entertain the thought of our own inexistence, though we know it must surely come one day. It's just too frightening to contemplate.

The state that we call life is different from anything else. Once lost, for whatever reason, it cannot be recovered. It cannot be re-activated, re-generated, or restored to working order. It is a one-off, a one-way ticket, a journey with the same destination for all of us. But, unlike other destinations, it is one which we do not want to arrive at, ever, as it’s a destination from which there is no return. It is literally the end of the road... for all of us, with no exceptions. And... that's more than enough clichés for one paragraph!

In the general scheme of thing, Nature has been unkind to us. The mind does not seem to age in tandem with the body. Our body wilts and withers inside and out. Our skin wrinkles and our hair falls out. Everything slows down and we become frailer and more fragile. We are often plagued by age-related illnesses and disabilities. And yet mentally we see ourselves as younger, it’s as if we’re stuck in a time warp. We may be in our nineties or a hundred plus but we’re not ready to die, we’re not psychologically prepared. We may believe in God and heaven and the whole package but we’re not ready to meet our Maker or dwell in paradise (assuming of course we’re not going to that other place!).

I have seen television programmes about people with monstrous deformities, severe disabilities, awful impoverished lives and nightmarish living conditions, and yet they all earnestly wish to carry on living and fear death. Their lives are full of suffering, physical and mental, their prospects dismal and depressing, but they cling to life and all the grief and hardship it offers them rather than envisage the finality of the alternative. In their position, would we who are more fortunate think and behave differently? Would we opt out of life before our time? Would you?

The reality is that we are all on this earth for but a short time. Some of us are blessed with a relatively long life (at least in human terms) and some of us are cursed with a life cut short by accident or illness, but both are infinitely short in cosmic terms. There’s usually not much we can do about this, barring suicide, and so we really only have one realistic option: to make the best of it while we can and avoid needless regrets in later life. The Latin expression carpe diem (seize the day), which nowadays is heard almost ad nauseam (another Latin saying), even from the lips of the relatively illiterate, is as true now as it’s ever been. Amen.