I realize that a lot of my readers are older; potentially those who either have entered or are about to enter the winter of their lives. That's a time of great reflection I believe, and while I'm not there yet, I want to give a shout out to those of you who are, and acknowledge your lifetime of accomplishements and your journey. Also: I'm not far behind!! In the winter of life, in the time of deep reflection, I believe a lot of us are likely confronted with the one thing we probably wanted most to avoid looking at: our own mortality. And as a result of that, we may face apprehension of what's next - since we're understanding now that this one-act play we've been in isn't going to stretch on into perpetuity and there is what seems to be an end approaching; often at a faster-than-we-can-keep-up-with pace. This apprehension - which I believe in a lot of us can turn to anxiety and even denial - is natural. But today I want to help us do what we can to embrace the unknowable, and let's take a journey through the fear of death and look at what it really is. I firmly believe that we can dismantle some misconceptions and unpack what it is that's really getting at us, and if we can do that, it doesn't have to be such a looming darkness in the distance.
My regular readers know that I am working toward finding a way to both acknowledge and incorporate the feelings we have about death and dying and to change them: I want us to work toward viewing death not as a dead end, but maybe instead a new beginning. At the very least, I want us reimagine it not as a fearful event to be avoided at all costs, but rather a part of the larger cycle of being into which we are all woven. To that end, I want to propose a navigable path through the fear of death and dying, and I believe it starts with one very simple - but not easy - premise: becoming comfortable with the unknown.
The Unknown
Death itself is not unknown to us. We know that human death is a process by which biomechanical systems reach an end to their functioning. This is not new. Since we have existed on this planet, we have experienced it. Everyone everywhere will experience it - it is a commonality we all share. We know that our bodies are going to age and fail, and that while
there are current movements that are attempting to eradicate this, for now at least this is an axiom that is assured to all. So in this reality, then, it is not the actual process of dying we fear most - though I'm certain reflections on all that may come with that (physical discomfort, early grief, and more) may seem harrowing. No, it's not death we fear: it's what comes after.
Because we really don't know, do we? We can't really - with any certainty - say what comes next. And it is that - the unknown thing - we fear most. If we do not know, we cannot have control. And in the western world, our lives are ordered in such prescribed way that control is top priority. Everything from the food we eat to the money we spend is tightly controlled; on the surface by us, but more deeply if we look we see that it is our civilian infrastructure that controls these things. Our autonomy is only suggested, not soverign. But it is our belief in the control that we have that makes it more significant to us. And since we believe we have no control over our ending, we do not. And that lack of control - which is rooted in not knowing - is our greatest fear.
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Biomechanical death is only one milestone we must reach on our journey
through the timelessness of infinity |
There is one inherent problem with this, however. And that's that a great many other things in life (besides what comes after death) are unknown. In fact, one might argue that
everything that exists outside of this moment we're in right now - where I'm writing this or you're reading it - is unknown. I don't
really know what tomorrow will look like. I have some general idea, of course, because of the actions I took today, but does that mean that tomorrow has a prescribed course of events laid out based on all the decisions I made today? No, it does not. Any number of examples can demonstrate this. One glaring example would be
the fated flight MH370 that went missing (and to this day hasn't been located) in 2014. I'd quite imagine that when those passengers boarded that plane, there was no indication at all that anything was amiss, and for all intents and purposes they assumed it would be a trip just like any other they had taken. Sure, the
possibility something could go wrong existed, but the
likelihood wasn't all that great that it would, so why worry? But the opposite happened, and inside the span of 24 hours many lives were forever changed irrevocably.
Uncertainties like this happen all the time. A recent
earthquake in Chile,
catastrophic flooding in Spain,
an unexpected lottery win for one couple, just to name a few. And not all of these uncertainties resulted in bad outcomes, either. Uncertainty is baked into our universe; we are not - and will never be - wired to understand what's around every corner. No matter what frontiers we conquer or what information we uncover, there will always be more frontiers we
haven't conquered, and more mysteries left yet to understand. This concept is modeled mathematically by
Godel's incompeteness theorems - and even more in
Heisenberg's indeterminacy principle. In fact, if we
really examine the nature of our journey here on this planet, we realize that uncertainty might be the guiding principle that underlies all. Death, then, becomes only one more milestone we must reach, or one more portal through which we must travel, as we continue our momentum through timeless infinity.
The unknowable fathoms of uncertainty, then, change their shape when regarded in this way. Biomechanical death becomes merely a part of a much larger picture: one where we're all a part of one great big whole, where nothing ever really dies, and all life is an emanation from the conscious heart of one universe that nurtures and evolves all in its great wheel. As we journey together forward in this timeline of ours, let's remind one another that not knowing is perfectly okay - we don't need to know. Our consciousness - our deepest observer - knows the way, and our individual self is free to rest in the mystery of not knowing what comes next.
We'll find our way. Guideposts have already been set along the path - we only need to let go of control and trust our feet to find the road.
