As it has crossed over the midnight threshold, I am officially a year older.
That is not much of an achievement really, yet sometimes I kind of think that it is. Because the older we get, it means that we are more likely to have faced all kinds of life-ending challenges but didn't succumb to the long, dirt nap. So I guess getting a year older means that a person has probably cheated death a fair bit. At least , I think that is the case for me, as I have had my fair share of near death experiences.
You?
I won't get into listing them now.
However, at my grand old age of forty seven, I would have been statistically dead in the US in 1900. Not that people actually died at that age, but due to high infant mortality and death in childhood, the average was skewed. Still, things have come a long way since then, with technological advancement making infant mortality very low indeed. In the developed world at least.
Yet, with all the advancements we have made to save lives, we have also advanced the ways we take lives too, where hundreds of thousands of people could be killed in an instant, or tens of thousands in a short time frame with a few drone bombing runs for a more targeted approach. We put a lot of effort into saving lives, only to put a huge amount of effort into taking lives instead. And I think it comes down to the fact that while saving lives is expensive and that life can be a consumer, it is far more profitable to take lives.
I get that terrible people and evil regimes are given as reason for more lives to be taken, more money, time and effort to be spent, but it is ultimately an unwinnable strategy. There is no end to terrible people and evil regimes, as long as we keep using violence as the solution, because it just inspires more terror or, it creates a control vacuum that will be filled by someone terrible or an evil regime over time. They might not start out evil, but power corrupts, no matter the initial intentions.
Pretty much the only way out of this is to break the repetitive cycle that we keep finding ourselves in, but it won't happen, because to do so will be taken advantage of by the already terrible and evil. No group can say no to violence, because they will meet a violent end and they hands of those who don't say no. It is a broken situation, which ends up just playing out as a tug-of-war game where various sides are pulling the rope in their direction, toward their cause, their agenda.
You only live once.
This is what I believe. However, perhaps one of the major problems is that most people believe in an afterlife, which means they have multiple lives. A "near death" experience might provide a person in the only live once camp to want to live more, experience more, love more. However, a similar experience for an afterlife believer could give them a different lesson, one where they see death as a gateway to a better life, in the after. A martyr for the cause, whether it be for a religion, country or a government, who will get some reward in a promised future.
It kind of feels like a scam, doesn't it?
Some of my friends were stuck in Dubai with their families, and a couple more were flying back from various areas through a narrow corridor from the east to the west, splitting war zones. They likely all feel like they have experienced something meaningful, like seeing the interceptor missiles taking out missile strikes, and will be glad to be home. But what they may have a newfound appreciation for, is the relative stability back home.
This is the lesson though, isn't it?
This is where our global resources should be spent. On stability. Not stability of experience where nothing changes, or even stability of government, or economy. But what we should be looking to build is stability for the basics in life, food, shelter, energy, society, opportunity. It shouldn't be a world of provide for some at the expense of others, because that will always end up being engineered to create more situations where terrible people can create evil regimes. Because people who are suffering and needing, are easier to control than people who are not.
Death is a natural part of life, but what is not natural is living for an afterlife. Whether there is an afterlife or not, the concept of living for one is a manmade creation. This doesn't mean we should treat the current moment as the only moment, because in all likelihood, the next moment is going to happen. But it doesn't matter if we have an afterlife or not, what we can predict is that people alive now will live longer than we will, and there will likely be more people coming who will live after we have already died.
That is our afterlife.
After we are dead, life goes on.
In my opinion, death is the end of me, but it isn't the end of us. That means that what I do, whether good or bad, will live on through others, whether they be family, friends, or strangers. And I think that if we were all looking to build opportunity and wellbeing for us all, the reverberating impact past any single individual would have a high compounded effect for the better. But because we keep running around in a circle of power and corruption, fear and violence, our forward progress is not just slowed, but can reverse direction and send us into decline.
Some say their near death experiences have made them better people. But the truth of whether they are better or not lays in their actions past that point. If they then go out and continue amplifying fear and violence, how can they be better?
I don't know if I am better or worse from my near death experiences.
For now, life goes on and every moment I have the chance to act.
Taraz
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