Death | The Story of Mortal Beings:

The Story of Mortal Beings

There is no incidence in my living memory quite like this one which drew so much of global attention. This world has seen deaths of so many big celebrities, so many tragedies and so many brutal wars but the way this covid-19, commonly known as corona-virus, has captured the world's collective consciousness, I have never before seen such a happening. Everyone, everywhere is talking about it. Because it concerns everybody and that because it threatens everybody. Otherwise, people die every year due to a number of reasons like Diarrhea, obesity, accidents and die in large numbers. What's happening around the world from the last one month, the chaos, fear, and panic, as the whole world seems to have come to halt, it all feels like we are watching a movie. Because we have seen such things happening in movies.

Empty roads, dead cities, everyday life getting completely shut. What happens when it comes to our life? emergency video conferencing of world leaders. that we are still in an unknown situation We have seen such a crisis in many movies and we have seen it in different situations. Sometimes it's a natural disaster, sometimes a deadly virus or an AI turned monster. We know what is an apocalypse. We have seen doomsday. Sometimes it's not astrologers but artists who predict the future for us. Tomorrow if we are all dead, then we know how it would be and how it would look without us, we have even seen this. But we are so busy in our everyday life, chopping wood and fetching water, we are so knotted up in our everyday lives, that we never think that these imaginary situations can also become a reality. To know something and to experience it are two very different things. We know that we are mortal beings. means we will also die one day like any other living beings. At last, we all will turn into dust and be food for worms.

We know this. But we never feel it. We never really contemplate our own death...our own demise. Homo-sapiens have always struggled to believe this fact. We know that we are nothing more than heart pumping, breath gasping, meat-coated skeletons. But we never feel these things. We never feel that we are aging everyday. it feels so that we will be young forever. Usually, people see death with a very romantic and poetic perspective. Death is the new beginning. Death makes room for the new. Death frees us from our animal condition, liberates our soul. But the truth is that we have never been able to accept our own death. And it is natural too because as far as I understand, death is like a cruel joke on our life. The way we are self-aware, the depth with which we can self-reflect, the kind of rich consciousness that we have, we fall in love, we dream, we have ambitions, we listen to music, stories, we have hope, we make art, we seek ecstasy, joy, wonder..... And the way it is that at some point, all these capabilities will be seized from you. that everything and everyone you love will be taken away from you.

This is utter injustice to our life. as if we are all born with a death sentence. On one side we can fathom infinity and on another side is our finite body. Our temporary existence..our mortality. This is a conflict in human nature. Our behavior is heavily influenced by the awareness of our mortality. One side we want to live forever and another side we are to die for sure. Then, what do we do? How do we get out of this conflict? How do we make peace with it? Well, we find a solution to this through our culture. We make myth so that after death we can go from this world to another world, maybe in the kingdom of God and live forever if we are a moral person. We write poems, we make paintings. We try to do something for the greater good so that we can make a name for ourselves.

So that people remember us and we live on through our work. And sometimes we fall in love. We surrender ourselves in the arms of our lover and hope that perhaps he or she will free us of our mortal coil. Because when you are in love and with your lover, you are in an altogether another state. Mortality is the least of your worries. We do everything possible to give an eternal meaning to our lives. We do everything we can to aestheticism our life that extends us beyond our grave and our funeral. If not literally then we want to keep us alive symbolically. We just don't want to die. We are ready to believe anything that assures us that we will be forever. that there will be no end. But by the end of the day, everybody dies.

At last, all we get is a disappointment.By our lovers, by our dreams, by our gods. In its true sense, no one saves us from our mortality. We all fear death. Even those who want to go to heaven don't want to die....as Steve Jobs once said. And the immediate reason for this is physical pain. You don't know how you will die. But if we deeply analyze it, we find that it's not only pain but rather what we actually fear is non-existence. We fear that we will cease to exist..we will extinguish. We are afraid that people will forget us. But the truth is We are all born to be lost in obscurity. What's the success of even Steve Jobs in the face of oblivion? What's seventy, eighty or even ninety years of finite life in the face of infinity? Whether you realize this or not but from the perspective of the Universe, if you comprehend its whole time span which is billions of years your life span is just a fraction of a dot. In a very real sense, we are already as good as dead.