Life is beautiful, I truly believe that. It may be the ultimate gift given to us by the great creative force behind the Universe.
We’ve all wanted to live forever at some point, but let’s use our imagination and think what life would be like if we all did.
First of all, nothing would get done. Well certainly not quickly. If you were always able to put off doing something until later with absolutely no time restrictions AT ALL, the word urgency would cease to exist. We would spend forever ruminating and brooding and thinking about things in an effort to get them perfect – but because we can never achieve perfection very few of our projects would ever get finished and what we did try to finish would likely leave us frustrated.
In a serious conversation about death, octogenarian Groucho Marx told his son Arthur that 80 years was more than plenty of time to live. If you knew you were going to live until at least 80, how much longer would you want to continue on? A hundred years? A thousand? Would the amount of time really matter after a while, or would it be the quality of your life that mattered?
Let’s put it this way. What if your choice was living an extra 30 years filled with health, excitement, love, passion and reward or sixty years confined inside your home by yourself with nothing to do (no books, no TV, phone or computer devices and no people) which would you choose? Most would choose the former. So what does that tell us? In many ways it’s the quality of our life that matters.
Knowing we are going to die can actually help us improve our quality of life. In my case, having a serious illness and coming close to death due to toxic shock when I was 18 gave me a very real sense of my own mortality. It gave me a push to pursue my dreams that many other people I know just don’t have. If there is something I really want to do, I usually find a way to do it. I recognize opportunities quickly and act on them because I never know:
- If the opportunity will rise again and
- If it does, if I’ll be healthy enough (or alive) to do it.
Death that gave life - remnants of a supernova Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/SAO, Infrared: NASA/JPL-Caltech; Optical: MPIA, Calar Alto, O.Krause et al
On a much larger scale, death is all important in the grand scheme of the Universe. It’s how things change and grow. On a molecular level, most of the complex elements that make up our bodies and even our planet would not exist without the explosions from dying stars millions of years ago. On our own planet, the death of plants and animals provide the food and the fertilizer to keep life going.
On an evolutionary level, death and birth allow plants and animals to improve themselves genetically and adapt as their surroundings change. In the years before written communication the only information that was passed down and refined through generations was the information in DNA itself.
Finally, can you imagine how utterly boring life would be after thousands or millions of years? The amazing, unpredictable and constantly changing universe would seem dull and uniteresting. Been there. Done that. Know how it works. yawwwn.
