We as humans have been both plagued and saved from the fear of death simply because of the fact that we have been spawned from the system that is built upon the force of perpetuating life. Life and death are intertwined, inseperable as are good and evil.
Once one accepts the inevitability of both poles of reality and realizes that neither extremes are benevolent or malevolent in their inherent nature is the only way in which one can achieve the grace to navigate through each reality, moment by moment which neccesarily encompasses both extremes.
It's only through love, strength and acceptance of these fundamental facts that we can hope to transcend the factory of ideals, compartmentalism, exclusion, and alienation from the common force that has primordially unified us all since the dawn of time. Fear of death equals selfishness, and as humans I believe we have the capacity to transcend this shackling propensity. We're all going to die someday, that's a fundamental truth. Fear is a natural reaction to this tenet, and no one should be ashamed of experiencing it as it is a logical fear to be extricated from the only idea we have of life. The unknown is what we really fear.
So maybe the key is not to fight death, but to realize that it's just as beautiful as birth and just as necessary to our existence on this planet. Like a type of book that you loan from the library and eventually have to return so someone else can read it.
However, with this fear of death that has been packaged and sold to us, through conscious and subconscious means, we all seem to have this unspoken desire to live forever. The idea that we can fight through everything, with magic and science technology and skin peels. But what if we can't. Is it the death denial of our society that allows us to shave away forests and replace them with manmade clones in digital linear rows in place of the chaotic and fruitful ones. Does it allow us to vomit billions of dollars worth of beef onto land that was meant for us to sustain on it alone. Maybe our death denial allows us to ignore the fact that we can't keep this thing together for too much longer.
But who ever said that we were the smartest. When did God ever come down to tell you that you should live forever.
I have a secret desire to live for just 400 years then I could do the work of at least four people. That would be fun. 80 years seems short to me. Imagine the possibilities.
You can see microcosms of all these truths in the mundane existence of everyday life. Fly gets swatted on the wall but he/she tries to run away for fear of dying. In a linear way, body language reflects primal urges of lust and aggression that may be too primitive for us to even be aware of. It's all just a big messed up soup of love, cells, hate, ugliness, beauty, dirt, water, and dust that we find ourselves in these days.
One thing I've experience in nursing school is the fascination in seeing things evolve from being obscure and mindless into something this is very visceral and tangible. There's a certain addiction to seeing these realities unfold so effortlessly. It challenges my fear of death. But out of this revelation can come this sick preoccupation of actually witnessing these osbcure idealisms being born into harsh yet beautiful realities, and from that stems a humour so dark it could almost be confused with being morbid. You are the witness and have the opportunity to heal (which in itself remains obscure yet undeniably powerful), and with your humble hands finding out that you do have the power to heal doesn't take away from yourself but makes you STRONGER. But you have to be careful.
You know when sometimes you have that feeling that two concepts, ideas, or experiences have clashed and the clashing feels like a slow chemical reaction that is releasing all these substances and you know that this is changing you, for good. It can be beneficial, but I've seen it make alot of people hard, and hating.
Maybe that is just our inherited fear?
