Life. Take a pause and just think about Life. Birth, followed by death, disease, accidents, catastrophes, pandemics, and finally possible cognitive decline which renders it all irrelevant, unremarkable, and easily forgotten by your survivors.

Take a little longer pause. It doesn’t get any better, does it. In the quick moment you answer, you want to argue, you’ll say it does but when you pause and think…

This is not an argument for suicide. Or depression. Or giving up. It’s an argument for knowing.

One of the sharpest “pangs” of senior resentment is the “undebatable knowing” things could have been different, could have been better. I could have been a doctor, for example, and saved lives. If you take another pause and think about how much better your own life could have been well…don’t do it. Funny, how even if you’re told not to do it, you’ll do it anyway. Thinking our lives would have been better if they had been different appears to be a mandated process baked into our genes. Wonder if Mother Teresa ever felt this regret. Einstein. FDR. Bob Dylan. Clark Kent.

Two interesting stories in the news this past week might help us understand…something Two different people clinically “died” and then came back to life: Patient 1 after 6 minutes and Patient 2 after 21 minutes. They both had stories to tell. Patient 1 felt peace, light, and colorful beauty, including the “white light” most resuscitated patients report. But Patient 2 reported being approached by beings who “shackled” him and restrained him, resulting in them “harvesting” his soul as part of a “soul farming operation”.

Another story in the news articulated the centuries-old debate about the origins of life. When read in chronological order you can see human intelligence struggling to define the “how” of life while struggling with the why, what, when, and where surrounding the start of it all, as well.

Ai says “a prominent estimate from the Population Reference Bureau (is) 108 billion people have ever been born.” Subtract the “estimated” 8 billion people currently alive and you learn an “estimated” 100 billion people have lived and then died on this earth. How many do you remember?

So? This post has gone off the rails and needs to be euthanized as its point has slipped away. Like most of our “lives”, it began well but got sidetracked by “life”. Maybe that’s the point? Would be interesting to read comments from anyone who can make sense of this page. I personally, feel lost, but okay, as if it were meant to end this way. The post is what it is and I can deal with it. (Hint?)

As my favorite Doctor Steven Wright says: “I intend to live forever. So far, so good.”

But…nothing ever makes it easier, permanently, does it. Words of wisdom and thoughtful machinations* help, but only momentarily, like falling head over heels, today, for a lover you can’t stand 6 weeks later. (See Seinfeld: The Low Talker”.)

And the questions return.

Guess I’d better conclude with another pertinent Wrightism and see how long it lasts: “A conclusion is the place where you got tired of thinking.”

Amen?

*google the definition for full effect. It reveals intent.