Why I Generally Don't Worry about Dying

It's autumn again, which is, for me, the season of heightened feelings. I resist labeling this as good or bad for the Buddhist reasons of non-duality and all but also because I generally enjoy the intensities of this season. The ups and downs—the bright, crisp mornings and the wistful, ever-earlier evenings—they make me feel alive in ways that are, for me, less typical in spring and summer. Moody, rolling, peak-and-valley ways. And, naturally, this renewed (reawakened?) sense of being alive inevitably brings around thoughts of death.

I don't really fear death anymore. Is that weird? Perhaps not. Perhaps it is a fear that, for some people (like me), fades over time as they (we) come to realize and process through what it means to be mortal and what each of our lives means... and doesn't. I am fortunate to have had a normal-ish childhood and a normally challenging—and rewarding!—adulthood. Honestly, sometimes I think to myself, Damn, maybe that's enough. After all, there are many out there who don't get one or both of those, so gratitude helps.

Then there is understanding of minute impact. (That's my-NOOT right there, not minute, the sixty-second interval.) I think what I do every day matters in the same way what others do matters, which is to say, I think it all matters enough to keep up with the doing but nowhere near as much as we sometimes (or I used to) think. I write this blog right now because I feel enough of a creative impulse for the doing and because I hope that there is a person or two who might read it and benefit from my perspective, but I'm humble enough to recognize it is little more than a drop of water in an unfathomably massive pool. Its worth, then, is largely for me and for the potential utility to a couple of others out there. (If you are reading this, hi, dear other!) It's enough, but like almost everything, it's really not that big of a deal.

While these understandings likely inform my meh-ness toward my own death, I think the biggest impact comes from my own experiential realizations regarding sleep, dreaming, waking, and that big, only-somewhat-understood thing called consciousness.

I don't know about you, but me? I feel half-dead half the time, anymore. I'm an overworked American adult, and so, too often, I'm multi-tasking without fixed attention on anything. Or I'm following patterned behavior without a conscious thought about its doing. Or I'm interfacing with technology and not sure which world I'm living in. Or I'm driving myself to work and arriving without much of a clue of how I got there.

My God, we spend so much time of this precious life in something not unlike a trance—partly here, partly not. It's like we're sleep walking... or maybe sleep waking... or thinking we're awake and "here" when we're really not—not in the way we used to think, anyway. Sometimes I get an eerie feeling this is all some sort of simulation, but listen, I'm not crazy... yet. It's just that 1) I've watched too many episodes of Black Mirror and shows of that ilk, and 2) when you try to study it—really examine it—consciousness is so slippery, so amorphous and changing that it is almost a non-thing. And when you start to realize and account for all the times we're truly not present but elsewhere, drifting between states, you begin to develop a theory that maybe existence and living (versus non-existence or being "dead") aren't as hard-boundaried as we're all conditioned to believe.

Lately I've noticed something interesting about memory, time, photographs, and "truth" (whatever that is). The earliest photo I have in my phone is from 2010. Events from before that photo are still accessible to me through my memories, obviously (and an external hard-drive archive in the basement somewhere), but here is the thing that begins to send me spiraling a little bit: Without readily accessible digital pictures, those earlier memories start to feel a little less real. A little hazier or more gaussian. A little more like dreams, stories. And then I start wondering: As others' memories of events in our shared past begin to matter less to them and perhaps fall away and the same happens to mine, did those things ever happen in the first place? And, yes, of course they did, but then: Okay, they happened, but did those things exist? And do they still? Do they still exist?

One of the earliest photos I still have on my phone is this one from 2010 of the cat who raised me, sitting—by choice—in a laundry basket in the dining room of my first apartment after college.

Thankfully, about this time, I can come back around to what I believe is a better question, which is: does it even matter? And that's where I find my answer because no, it doesn't. Those things happened, and they existed for a moment or a time (and mattered to me or an us or not), and when we all forget about them, they may not exist anymore, but it is all okay and it doesn't really matter. I think that's basically how it goes with death: After we go to that final sleep, we might not exist anymore, but like lost or faded memories, it is all okay and it doesn't really matter—not in a nihilist kind of way but in an it's-all-okay kind of way.

We attach and cling to "life" and our concepts of it, but upon examination, we don't spend all too much time present in our lives. This can be a wake-up call to live more deliberately, absolutely, but it can also be a realization that we can chill out a little more about that once-scary thing we call death. We've all probably experienced some form of it several times over now, and it's never been that big of a deal. There is a good chance the final one won't be either.