Whenever I take a walk in nature I get back to the essentials of life. Daily life can often consume us and fill us with petty worries. More than 80% of the things that we worry about never happen and in a blink of an eye decades pass and we wonder: what have I done with my life? Perhaps you are tempted to feel a smudge of existential crisis hidden behind these words, but do not worry. I just try to get a grasp of life as it is. Aren’t we all trying to do the same?
As I stop and admire the trees from a vantage point I get a minuscule moment of bliss. I am really there, in the moment. My mind is clear of any of the worries. I need nothing, I have it all. I look at the trees and realize that these living creatures made out of wood will outlast me on this planet. I will be dead and they will still be alive. And another mortal will stop by in the same vantage point and admire the trees and wonder: what will I do with my life?
The passing of time seems to be a notion that eludes humankind. In a second it seems like a third of my life has just passed. Moments of complete despair, solitude or joy seem very distant. It seems like yesterday I was turning 18. But in the same time it is quite far away considering my age now. Gosh I sound old. I am getting old (er). But my dilemma is not about the game of numbers. You see, the same trees that I looked at might be dead before me because some crazy person decides that they will look better as furniture. And here we go down the drain with the ideal moment when another human being will experience the same philosophical dread by looking at the trees.
There is a constant in life and that is death. In our body cells die and get born again every single day. In nature there is no room for the weak: it is do or die. Although we do not think of mortality often because it seems quite dreary to do so, death is all around us. Death of cells, death of ideas, death of hopes, death of old habits, death of old friendships. Things die, regardless of our awareness of it. Perhaps our very fear of death makes us less appreciative of life. We think we have time. We think we have options. In the quantum field we do have the time. In the material world it seems that we are going against the clock. Tic, tac...you’re getting closer to the worms.
I also find it philosophically challenging to look at cemeteries as a good wake-up call exercise. Every single soul that is buried was once very right. And once very wrong. Once very loving. Once very hateful. And they’re all gone just like they’re all the same: flesh and bone. Who cares anymore? Big conflicts seem so minuscule in the grand scheme of all. Is it worth losing your mental sanity in order to prove that you are right? Is it worth fighting unfairly to get even with someone if in the end we will all lie in the soil with the worms?
It is easy to not think of things like this because daily life makes it normal to believe that what we feel entitled to do is actually right. A mental stroll through human history can prove to us that what was once considered normal proved to be abysmal. So the notion of right and wrong are warped by the times that we are living.
I am tempted to believe that we do not think enough about our own mortality. It is a protective mechanism. But it protects us from what? It is not like avoiding the subject of death will make you less prone to...dying. So I would actually salute a moderate stroll in this area as in teaching us to appreciate life more. A lot less people would quarrel and bicker if they would know that tomorrow the petulant partner will not wake up anymore. A lot more people would choose to take action and talk to that someone and show them that they do care. I believe that even enmities would dissolve as too often you make an enemy out of someone that you secretely admire. Mortality is like a purifying fire: if you mentally go through it you get stronger and wiser and make better decisions. The real scary thing should be a lack of awareness about death. We should be scared of becoming too comfortable with living and taking tomorrow for granted. Millions of people will not wake up tomorrow.
Another mental exercise would be interesting and perhaps frustrating to do: if tomorrow is your last day on this planet, what would you regret for not doing? What ideas and actions have you buried deeply thinking that there is more time? I dare you to dig deep in the cemetery of dreams, we all have our skeletons down there living while parts of us were dying...
