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We Don’t Need to Be ‘Immortal’
We can ask instead how we’ll survive
My oldest essay idea is on immortality. These ideas have been kicking around my files since 1998. We don’t live forever, and I think New Year’s 2023 is a good 25-year prompt to set them free into the sky.
The ideas appear with light, flexible connections, as if fragmented, not because I haven’t tried to fit them into the egg, but because they burst forth from that egg.
Reflections on Immortality
On Fear
Life depends on the physical body, fragile as it is. Many of us are distracted and distressed to remember that. It makes us feel insecure.
We have nightmares, tell weird tales, raise hackles, describe our own doom.
The threats we believe in are the ones we fear. We will accept anything but that—the threat we’re worrying about right now. We make the topic taboo. The anticipation is worse than the outcome. The fear mounts. We fear the forest at night beyond this visible life. We fear the forest.
We dream ourselves indestructible. We don’t have to contemplate ways we don’t believe we can die.
If we are brave, grounded, and wise, those who follow us may have no fear.
Opening and Closing
Life and death is a package experience. It happens through injury, illness, old age. The body that grants us life will cause our death. One position opens; the other closes.
When we repress thinking about one end of this life-and-death equation, we fixate on the other end and yet we can’t understand it. Life and death, viewed separately, seem ungraspable.
Simultaneous awareness of both leads to fuller understanding. Life and death explain each other.
Individual and Collective
The individual lives, so the individual dies.
The collective lasts longer. It does not die in the biological sense. Sometimes the individual is willing to die to serve the collective.
Sometimes we focus on extending our own individual lives.
