Life is an Amazing Opportunity

Posted on March 21, 2013. Filed under: Uncategorized |

Last night I had dinner with a friend who has been thinking quite existentially of late. He used to work in our world, but had dedicated the last year or so, and most of his mental energy, to what I can only call enlightenment or understanding. It is an unusual path to take for sure. Half of me worries that the is going of the deep end and the other half worries that I am not focusing on these important questions he’s so deeply examining. In the same way that you look at a monk and think “wow, different life choice…I wonder if he’s doing it right and I’m doing it all wrong” I sometimes look at this friend’s year in such fashion.

Anyway, last night we got to talking about existence, the purpose of life, achieving one’s destiny, dealing with death, and a myriad of other related concepts. It was nice to exercise this part of my brain. One thing that I realized, which I think is fascinating, is that weather or not there is something before or after the “embodied life” (embodied life = traditional concept of human life from when we are born till we die), one of things that is unbelievabley special about this period of time, is that we are in a form that is capable of changing things. In a world where there are particles (matter) and waves (energy), the human form is this unusual composite, or combination of the two, that is capable of mixing shit up and moving it around. I can lift a glass, move a particle, rearrange the way that things are in this form. If I were to exist in some form after death, as a tree, or a glass, or pure energy, or really any other distribution or composite of particle and wave, I may well participate in existence, but I may not be able to change it. Especially where you examine such concepts as space and time, it seems that this window of embodied existence, especially on a system level, assuming we are part of a broader system or set of things that exist, is the part of any cycle where we have our chance to rearrange or improve, or simply impact existence as a whole.

If you have been reading this blog for a while, you know that I value change deeply. Look upper right of this page and you’ll see how important impact is in a human’s life. Sometimes I wonder if people fear death, especially as it nears, when they are dissatisfied with the way things are in the world (or their small sliver of the world) and they realize that they are running out of time in this special “embodied form” when they have the capacity to change or reorder things. Those who can find peace or satisfaction in the way things are, perhaps come to accept death more easily, where they don’t feel this deep feeling that their work as a change agent is far from done.

All of this brings me to the following: whether there is something after this, whether I will persist or not, I do not know. What I do know, is that I have this unusual super power that all other embodied beings have, which is to change and reorder the way things are…I can change existence…and I’ll be damned if I don’t use it, consciously, every single day. I can’t help but view this embodied life, however long or short it may be, as an incredible opportunity…and one that I am deeply grateful to have.