Contemplating Life & Death (Part 1)

The hardest reality everyone will face is coming to terms with the fleeting nature of our present existence. As far as we know, we get just one shot at life. No matter how common, it never becomes less jarring to see a life cut short by violence or disease. In response, we cling to some sense of control over the duration of our own life. Our professed right to live, or even our professed right to die, take center stage in debates like abortion, the death penalty, and euthanasia. One difficulty in these debates is that there isn't a good point of comparison outside of human beings when we attempt to quantify the value of life. Depending on the lens through which we see the world, life can appear to be despairingly futile, abundantly blissful, or perhaps just mundane.

Nature, while full of beauty, is also cruel and unforgiving. Take, for example, the common cuckoo bird. This bird has evolved to lay eggs that resemble the eggs of other bird species. The mother bird, considered a "brood parasite", lays her eggs in the nest of other bird species who unknowingly raise the common cuckoo chicks as their own. Even more shocking is that these baby cuckoo chicks, soon after they hatch, often destroy the host bird's eggs by pushing them out of the nest. If this were a human act, we would be mortified by the evil displayed through this deception and infanticide. But these birds are just doing what they evolved to do. They aren't evil. They have adapted this behavior to survive. It's all part of the circle of life, as every kid in the 90's learned from Disney's The Lion King.

But we aren't mere animals. We aren't driven solely by primal instincts. We are able to moralize and empathize in a way that causes us to consider more than our own survival. Particularly when our individual survival is not at risk, humans tend to value the wellbeing of their community and seek to live in a way that doesn't harm others. I think we do this because as we deal with the truth of our own mortality in a healthy way, we tend to gain a greater appreciation for all life. It seems that the more we openly accept the reality of our fleeting existence, the more sacred life becomes.

"How rare and beautiful it is to even exist." - Sleeping at Last, from the song Saturn

What nature does teach us is that death precedes new life. Every instance of life is conceived and given sustenance by expressions of life that came before it. Somehow, despite the Earth's cataclysmic history, life has endured. What nature doesn't teach us, except perhaps through the better parts of our human nature, is that we are capable of more than mere survival. We are capable of love, compassion, and selfless generosity that comes from a deeply interconnected awareness. The more aware we become that our lives and wellbeing are intertwined, the more we are able to experience a life full of purpose and meaning. Nature values a high quantity of life, but something in us also strives for a higher quality of life which is discovered through a growing awareness of our union with all life.

It is here, in this unified awareness of existence, that death loses it's permanence. Through experiences of great love, or even great tragedy, we see that our individual life is inseparable from Life itself. From within the narrow view of our personal lifespan, we are a mere blip on the timeline of human existence, and even less on the timeline of the universe. But if we can quiet our ego long enough to witness life flowing freely in, through, and out of ourselves like the inhale and exhale of each breath, we may come to realize that we are a part of the whole rather than something separate. This awareness of our essential union is eternal life.

"We’re grounded in a peace that is not dependent on anything at all, for it is the deathless love of God that sustains us, like the eternality of our self in our fleetingness through time, not as a liberation that transcends the world to take us away from it but as a liberation that gives us the courage to be present to it." - James Finley