My recent posts have discussed a lot about the mystery of life. So, you know I see life as a great big mystery. Well, I think we all do, but many people avoid thinking that way, having so much certainty about what life is because they have and use religion to avoid seeing it all as a mystery. They have it all worked out, and they have certainty about it all and they have their religious leaders to tell them everything they need to know.
Well, for me, thinking along these lines, I see the biggest mystery being when and how it all ends for us, individually. Yep, we’ve all had our beginning/creation date (birth date) and we ALL have our “expiration date.” And I have real problems handling that one. Wish I could just deny death as many people do. As philosophers, psychologists, theologians and most people say, the fear of death is what drives us in life. Always there, like it or not. And, to be honest, sometimes, I say sometimes, I almost am okay with it but not really. And sometimes it horrifies me.
I have always been around death. Playing at age six with my cousin one day, then he’s dead the next day (I mentioned this in a previous blog), in my college years living and working in a mortuary with an apartment there next to all the bodies. The things I’ve seen…. So, denying death does not work for me. And especially now, having lived a long life and not having decades and decades of living ahead of me like I have always had. And several recent deaths of friends. A friend of fifty-two years died last year that really affected me. I had told him of recent passings of my friends and he said, “oh, Wally, don’t worry, you and your spouse and I are a long way from that situation. Then, three weeks later he dies suddenly as we were planning to get together.
Oh, and I know many people have had near-death-experiences and tell us that there’s nothing to worry about, we just keep going on to better things, etc. I don’t deny people have those experiences, but that really does not eliminate my anxieties and concerns about our “expiration date.” Yes, that’s my big concern now in my life… what is my “expiration date?”
It is so bizarre. It could be today, it could be tonight, it could be in a few weeks or years. And yes, it would probably be even worse if I did know when it will be. And so, what do we do, just keep going on? Ahhhh, yeah, that’s what we do. We keep going on. And at times I’m almost at peace with that and at other times I’m a “basket case” you could say.
So, I’ve written a lot about my take on the mystery of life on this earth. I’ve written about my living and “surrendering to faith.” And I’ve written about my uncertainty about what faith really is. So maybe I really am just a nut case. Maybe it would be easier, better to just deny death like so many people do and live for the moment. Well, in a sense I do, yet in another sense I am driven crazy by knowing what’s coming, even for those of us who have deep spiritual lives.
So, obviously my logic and thinking are just spinning in circles right now, but as I see it, “that’s life!” And, for me, it’s a good life. It’s been a grand life. I wish it wouldn’t end, but that’s not the way it goes. Yes, we have that damned “expiration date.” Each one of us. No exceptions. At least we are all in the same boat. How do you handle all of this? Maybe I’m not so strange after all. Maybe I think too much. Maybe I just don’t bury my anxieties like so many do.
Wally