How to appreciate life

Many, if not most, folk squander their lives as they slog through the thick mud of mundanity. This wastefulness is because of a belief in some sort of afterlife, some sort of perpetuation of the self. In the back of the mind there is the idea of a second chance.

If we accept that this is it, there is only one go-around, that we are unique beings that have never been here before and will never be here again, if we dispel the notion that we get a second chance through reincarnation or going to heaven or to hell, if we realize that we die and by dying vanish from eternity even more quickly than we appear, then every day, every breath, every moment would become so precious to us that unless we were fools we would do what it takes to make sure that our brief time in existence is of significance, if only to ourselves. We would stand in awe of the miracle that is life from its most simple form to its most complex. We would not waste time in fretting our hour upon the stage.

As Shakespeare has Macbeth say (I found this with the links on a web page; my apologies that I did not record the provenance),
"To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow, creeps in this petty pace from day to day to the last syllable of recorded time, And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle! Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player That struts and frets his hour upon the stage And then is heard no more: it is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing."

An unnoticed "miracle"

Yesterday I was thinking about how we are always individuals, even from conception, even though we go through a period of sharing the functions of our mother's bloodstream. We do not share the blood, just the bloodstream functions. The individual floats up the fallopian tubes and embeds into the uterine lining. The interface between the individual and mother forms; we call it a placenta. Mother, uterus, placenta, umbilical cord, infant. The entire time of gestation the individuals remain separate. Yet there is nutrient and gas exchange across the villi of the placenta, and this exchange enables life to be passed on. If a product of evolution, definitely all the right changes took place at all the right times. If a product of design, how infinitely wondrous the knowledge of detail. But who thinks about placentas routinely except those who have to discard them on a daily basis?

Double Nickels

A dear friend of mine just turned 55 years old. I told him,

"The best thing about turning 55 is that you don't have to be nice to anybody any more, and you can wear purple if you want to (or so they say). The worst thing about turning 55 is that in 5 years you will be 60. I guess that beats the alternative, though."