Limited beats

Life is a cruel mistress. Our affair with life is, like many affairs, short lived: the passions fleeting, the pleasure always tainted by the knowledge of things to come. The deeper our love, the greater our bitterness as it dies—as we die. Death is the spouse which we cannot divorce, which we never chose to wed, but were wed to all the same.

And so, like lovers who will not acknowledge the futility of their feelings, we keep on with life, storing up joy and happiness and hiding it away for that inevitable point when we know the game is up. We don’t like to think about it, we don’t want to ponder it—for if we look at it, even for a moment, it floods in, drowning out everything, reducing us to clock watchers and hypochondriacs and beings who dread. And dread is the killer of joy, death before death.

There are many who say that they do not fear death, and maybe they don’t. There are those who have confronted it, knowingly, and did not blink. There are many who choose death over life, as if life was the fate they wished to escape from. But the instinct to survive is strong, and most of us reject death, and cling to life with the hope that it will bear us more happiness than sorrow.

Sometimes my wife (my real wife) will lay her head on my chest, listening intently, and will whisper that she can’t believe someday my heart will stop beating. But there is nothing more certain than the limited number of beats my heart will give. Yet in the face of this truth, I do have a choice. I can choose to keep death at bay in my consciousness, never giving it more attention than I have to, grappling with its cold approach only when there is nowhere else to look. Or I can let death become what it ought to be: that which gives our lives meaning.

Without death, no moment, no experience would be what it is. Happiness would be infinitely achievable, and joy would be a common commodity. Discovery and accomplishment would be only a matter of time. The true obstacle to life would not exist. I would prefer such an existence, we might say—but we speak out of fear. When we can stop fearing death, and begin to use it, then we have learned how to live.

Everywhere in existence there are analogies to death. Every thing has a conceivable beginning and an end. Every blade of grass withers, every plant dies. All day turns night, and night to day. The seasons come and go. Buildings crumble, water dries up, and every movie has ending credits. We are no exception. We stop growing, we stop regenerating. Our skin wrinkles, our hair grays or falls out, and we slowly but surely begin to return to the dust we once were.

I do believe death is victorious only over the physical. I like to imagine an intangible sphere where minds and souls and ideas and deeds live on. Call it heaven, call it the memory of the living. But even in my dream these intangibles are immutable, made into what they are by the beings who forged them in life, cemented in permanence by death. In dying, our imprint is made complete, and nothing may be added. Our precious time will end, and so I say this to myself and to anyone who hears it:

Stop wasting it.


"Who's killin us...
robbin us of life and light...
mocking us with the sight of what we might have known?"

-Explosions in the sky, Have you passed through this night?


-N