And there is only one thing we say to Death: Not today!
I was the one who wrote the reflection of my group's presentation:
Nothing prevails, eventually everything is forgotten.
So what is the point?
But it was not meant to be depressing, nor to provoke an existential crisis. The main idea was, on the one hand, to point out the meaninglessness of life, and on the other, and more important, to make you realize that every problem lacks relevance in comparison.
If we were actually conscious of our mortality and the fact that death makes everyone equal, racial, gender, and social class differences would have no place within the world.
Life and death are such beautiful mysteries of which we know nothing. All we have are conjectures. What we know for sure is that life is short, and that sooner or later we all have to leave this place.
Before us great Death stands
Our fate held close within his quiet hands,
When with proud joy we lift Life's red wine
To drink deep of the mystic shinning cup
And ecstasy through all our being leaps--
Death bows his head and weeps.
-Rainer Maria Rilke.
Veo venir una dama,
sonriendo hacia mi,
si esa dama es la muerte,
¿quién tiene miedo a morir?
-WarCry
What is the point of enjoying? None, but at least you will have enjoyed.
Frodo: I wish the Ring had never come to me. I wish none of this had happened.
Gandalf: So do all who live to see such times, but that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.
You did not choose when and where you where born.
You did not choose your family, your name, or your gender.
You did not have the opportunity to decide where you came from, but you can decide where to go from there.
Life your life as if you could die at any moment.
Live it in such way that, when the time comes, you can die without fear.
As for the third brother, Death searched for many years but was never able to find him. Only when he attained a great age did the youngest brother shed the cloak of invisibility and give it to his son. He then greeted Death as an old friend and went with him gladly to parting his life, as equals.
-J.K. Rowling, "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows"
The BIG question: You are dead, now what's next?. As Gandalf said:
ResponderEliminar<< 'End? No, the journey doesn't end here. Death is just another path, one that we all must take. >>
As you said detah is the biggest demonstration of equality in this world, a painful truth that most of people try to hide. That kind of believes were incredibily predominant during te "Dark Ages", influenced by the christian belief of that time. Graphic ilustrations about the dance of death (also known as Totentanz or Danse macabre) were really popular among the population.
Nevertheless, during renaiscence and the following decades, light came to the world and life started to look beautiful instead of something futile and meaningless.
Finally I believe that life is not so meaningless as some people think. We have a purpose, a reason of why we are here. We are not an accident of nature, we are nature!, we are creation. To discover our purpose depends only in ourselves.
As far as life is concerned, the lack of meaning has presented to our ephemeral existance. It has been demostrated through history how mankind died looking for a gist of what their own existance mean. That's why it is a must for us to decide, in spite of everyone may see or perceive, between spending our lives looking for what it lost in time or face the gateway of this white omniscient inferno and deal with it.
ResponderEliminarAs you have said, there are features of life that are unpredictable such as origin-wise, but the way we decide how to live our present will function as a ladder to build up our future.
ResponderEliminarThis whole topic of death shocks me in the sense that nowadays we only "appreciate" life because we are expecting to eventually die, this represents how human mentality has entered a black hole where we are always expecting bad things to happen in order to learn from them, there is no drive to prevent manageable situations from happening. I could relate this to The Sun Also Rises topic of living live as an aficionado or as a pro, people nowadays sit around waiting for things to come on their own, there is no will to take the bull by the horns and start making those things happen in life just for the sake of wanting to live our lives to the fullest as leaders, not as followers.