Mauricio writes...
Story 31 - Birth, Life, and... (Im)mortality
Mauricio writes...
Story 31 - Birth, Life, and... (Im)mortality
Everything in this world has a beginning, a middle and an end.
Even our tiny Earth once experienced a moment of change from a confusion of gases and incandescent matter through a cooling period to its beginning as a planet. One which is advancing through its “youth” today but which may some day collide with a madcap comet or cool down and expire with the sun.
But on the surface of this world, millions of creatures travel the life cycle from beginning to end. Some turn into fossils, others become extinct, a few leave a trail of intelligence and light to illumine the way of those who come after them.
In the human race we have admirable examples of messengers of light, of spirit, of hope. Beginning with the anonymous discoverers of fire and the fusion of metals for use as utensils, then the builders of the first non-natural dwellings and the authors of the written word and mathematics, culminating with the conquests of art in general and the basic tenets of modern science and technology. But in the midst of this legion of creators, there were also prophets, leaders and thinkers with names and addresses. Individuals who brought religious orders, nations and customs into being.
We are the fruit of millions of years of quests and discoveries and a few blunders. It is all part of life and destiny; part of the passion for challenge. And most certainly it is what propels us to the natural end: death. Which is where the problem lies.
We participate in life from the very beginning, we think we can manage our journey through it fairly well, but... why aren’t we able to escape our ultimate fate, death? Or worse still, why can’t we understand it, know it, know where it takes us?
After all, we may not want to enter that “dead end” that we’re taught is inevitable, with no way out, no chance for escape. For if there’s anything that man the animal, as the human race, refuses to accept, it’s fatality, the unavoidable, the inescapable. It’s our natural anxiety for freedom, for quest, for knowledge... and for perpetuity, the continuation of life.
We have the right to contest it; we simply don’t know how to yet. Science has been coming up with pseudo-solutions like cloning and genetic research in addition to chemical and therapeutic wonder substances that prolong life and youth. Still, the Grim Reaper remains a mystery. After life and the passion for life.
And yet there is a way to get around the “Great Unwanted”: by doing something for one’s fellow being, by sowing seeds of goodness, gestures of affection, lessons in humanity. It is the way we can survive beyond our time of physical presence on earth, the way we can perpetrate ourselves and even teach our children the art of immortality.
Mauricio de Sousa
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