Brace Yourself

Death is so satisfying that even though I know that I don’t know how I will be reacting to it, I still demand it. It’s like a constant struggle with it—I know it’s there, and I know it’s not my time yet, but I ask for it to take me. I’ve read somewhere that the intense emotion of dying is the first sign of true intellectualism, but for me, it’s not about being intellectual. For me, it’s about the point where I just collapse and cease to exist. I sigh for the moments, sometimes wondering how beautiful it’s going to be. Existence is complex, it demands effort, but death is just uniquely linear. It came in the form of disease, famine, drought, war, and even from error—human or natural—yet the linearity is in the end goal. No matter what the process is, eventually, you will just die. Even if you know you live like a king or peasant, fool or thinker, beggar or rich, insensitive or empathetic, even if not consciously deep somewhere you know someday you will die.

As a kid, I used to think that soon humans' technological development will allow us to transfer our consciousness into hard drives because for a 10-year-old in 2005, hard drives were the technological pinnacle. Today, you could say why not SSDs, but I’ll go with quantum storage to be safe. I thought I just had to live until that time, and I wouldn’t be dying. I would be immortal and able to see everything. I am not my body; I am my mind and this came from the 10-year-old who could not differentiate between mind and brain. I didn’t know what I meant by everything—I was just 10—but I thought I just didn’t want to die. Death is just absurd; it’s not supposed to happen to a conscious being. And why are people not afraid of death? Whenever I heard people around me talking nonsense, how everything has to die and it’s all written, I got furious. Why? Why are they not able to see through their faulty logic? Where is it all written? I can definitely say that I was skeptical by birth and never truly believed in the idea of God. I just questioned God. I feared Him too, because He had all those superpowers and could smite me if I talked too much. I tried hard to be a theist and used to go to the temple every Tuesday, yet I wasn’t able to do this for more than a couple of months. I never liked this tag of atheism too; it simply means I denounce the idea of God because I have evidence. It’s a certainty, and since I don’t like being certain about things I have not discovered myself or that I have no idea how they work without proper understanding and evidence to prove my claim, I always refrain myself to announce as atheist (and I am definitely not a Nastika too).

If you ask me today, I can assess the intensity and tone in how you’ve asked about my belief system, and even if I have none, just to piss some theist off, I can announce myself as an atheist. God, for me, was always a punishment machine that somehow calculated your sins and good deeds and punished you even after your death. I mean, death is such a beautiful thing, and humans all around the world have made it into some kind of otherworldly phenomenon. The idea of another world—we’ll talk about it later someday, so let’s focus on death.

So when I say, no matter what you do, death is a linear process. No matter what, you will die. Should you not be preparing yourself for it? Why entangle so much into the world? I understand that each one of us has to play our part; this is how the world functions. But are you not supposed to just prepare yourself for the inevitable destiny? The path you started walking on from the moment you breath out of your mother's womb. No matter what you are achieving and where you are going, the biological decomposition is happening at a certain rate. You can control it by eating healthy, sleeping properly, and so on and so forth, but why? Shouldn't you just make your day count as a living conscious being?

I think now I have got that idea that living 500 years, or 250 years, or even 100 is not such a good idea after all. What are you going to do just by living 100 years? Should now you just play your part! Contribute something to the civilisation. Billions have come and gone before you and maybe trillions more will be, so leaving a footprint is all that counts. Imagine living 100 years of a miserable life rather than dying at the age of 50 with a patent of warp drive. Imagine dying on 5th September 1906 (age 62 years), Duino, Italy. You had a tragic life, tragic relationships and even a tragic death but you are the reason for the 2024 Physics Nobel Prize, changing life even after 118 years of ceased existence. Or you could live like my grandfather who died at the age of 94 and I do not think he will be remembered anymore after me and there is no reason for me not to be as fateful as he was (maybe).

Image Credit : Meta AI for whatsapp 
 
But was he prepared? I don’t know but I just want to be prepared for it at last. It's coming from, I don't know which direction, which method, when and how but it's coming for sure.

So you should ask me, reader, how should one prepare for it? Well, ask yourself what happens if you just die right now, right at this moment of reading this? Have you lived a life satisfactory enough that even if you cease to exist this instant, you won’t regret it? What if there is an afterlife and a cosmic being asked you to play chess for your final judgement and you don’t know how to move e4 e6? What about your incomplete reading list? What about your music playlist or movies you thought you must watch once? What about the place you wanted to visit or people you wanted to meet? What about your parents? When was the last time you had a meaningful conversation with them or even talked for a minute? Emotions you wanted to express but you haven’t yet. Ask what if right now at this moment death manifests itself as a hooded cadaver, puts his hand on your shoulder, and asks you to deboard this train because this is your stop. Are you prepared for it?

-m. Dinesh

M.दिनेश© 

-Dinesh Mandora     

Dinesh Mandora All rights reserved ©

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