Change Perspective And You Shall Never Die
It’s all in your limitless essence
We, humans, are the one species that has to confront its mortality. Rejecting the idea of our death is counter-productive, but suffocating at the idea that we have little time left is castrating. One of the critical abilities of the art of living is finding the right balance in our relationship to death.
I was recently confronted by the death of my mother and, 3 years later, of my brother. Although these were the most brutal shocks to take in, they were also the most profound life lessons to my own mortality. When my mother passed away, I realized every moment I’d had with her had been unique. That last dinner at Maxim’s when I gave her chocolates? The one and only time.
When my brother died all of a sudden at 44 years old, I realized that I, like him, planned on a long life and sunny retirement, but any of us can lose everything in the flash of an instant. Both of their deaths gifted me with the intense awakening to the preciousness and uniqueness of each and every moment. They taught me to start and do something with my life right now. I gave a second thought to my priorities and accepted the need to be with the people I most loved. I found another job and came back to my homeland and family. I re-started reading philosophy and psychology.
One of my friends suffers from a heart condition and knows that he can have a heart attack anytime. Sometimes he’s paralyzed by this acute awareness of his vulnerability; other times, he just wants to feel alive and defy death.
Here are considerations that brought me serenity and that I share with him when he looks too straight into the Grim Reaper’s eyes.
What qualifies as life anyways?
When Lynn Margulis describes the process of the birth of life in the cradle of primitive earth in Microcosmos, she explains the spontaneous formations of amino acids, DNA, RNA, and the molecule of energy, ATP. In the absence of atmospheric oxygen, these nutrients and structures were stable, and primordial Earth must have been a roaring soup of energy and food. Membranes of phospholipids also naturally took shape just like a drop of oil that falls in the water. When can this spontaneous unity with an interior containing water and nutrients be considered alive? Biologists answer that it’s alive when it becomes autopoietic, meaning it is capable of maintaining itself against the odds and challenges from the environment, when it can create and substitute its own parts and eventually make new ones. Lynn Margulis and the partisans of the Gaian theory argue that Life on Earth is an autopoietic system, reacting to the adversity brought by environmental variations to maintain itself.
Life and death of a neuron
Take one of your cells, say, a neuron. We now know that neurons can form and die throughout life, even in your nineties, so this new life could have its birthday today — maybe just now as you are learning this.
You are born from a neural stem cell in the hippocampus, at the center of your head. Your mother, like a bacterium, simply split in two to make you. You are a newborn and already expected to take on a great journey. You have one chance out of three to succeed and reach your destination alive. You need to migrate through the brain, following fibers and orientating yourself thanks to chemical signals. It’s quite easy to be an upper motor neuron, you’re not going that far, you are staying in the brain.
You are doing great, you developed correctly and reached your goal, you’re a hero neuron! Now that you are where you need to be, you have to differentiate and be trained for your job. You stretch and grow, taking an example on the surrounding cells. Your axons grow very thin and long to transmit the electrical impulses that will allow movement. You grow a myelin sheath, very leak-proof, and proudly take message after message down the road. You are lucky enough that you are the one type of cell in the body with the longest life span.
But despite your years of dedicated service, your host went playing football and foolishly, albeit with some pride, caught a ball with the head. The shock was too much for you and you died within an hour from the trauma.
Each day, 100 billion of your cells die and are substituted by new ones, without changing your identity, without you even noticing. This is the normal process of life.
You are just a cell in the organism of Life
In his beautiful Teachings on Love, Buddhist Master Thich Nhat Hanh proposes meditations that honor all the ancestors that have come before us and all the new generations that will come after us, as well as meditations, head onto the ground to feel the buzz and the contact of the Earth, that celebrate all life forms that breathe and vibrate right now, together with us in this world and this moment.
These are very simple ways to remember that we are nothing but a cell in the organism of Life, in autopoietic Gaia. I am the continuation of my Mother, I am the cell sitting next to my Brother. I live through them and they live through me. I will keep living through the lives I’ve touched, and maybe the lives I’ll give. Everything changes.
“Family is never destroyed, it transforms. A part of it goes into the invisible”
Priest Antonin-Gilbert Sertillanges (1863–1948) in his sermon for grieving families.
This understanding that our dying is no more important than the senescence of a cell at Gaian scale brings tremendous peace. Cultivate your love for life, and rejoice in the certitude that it goes on, that all present life on this planet will still be there when you die, still evolving, still shining, still carrying this essence that you had in your microcosm.
