Contemplating Death on a Sunny Day
Or why I am so good at pretending to be immortal
I always thought that life would make sense one day. With time I was sure I’d come to see what it all meant, what I learned, and what words of wisdom I could impart to others to make easier their paths as though I were an early explorer of this thing called life, bushwhacking through time. I waited for the big aha moment.
It never came.
I have some intense memories. Some come to me like tiny stories with precise beginnings, middles and ends, but without obvious meaning. These are like Aesop’s fables with no neatly summarized mottos. The tortoise and the hare? They never met. Or the hare won the race and that was that.
But I knew from my deep grasp of the biology of the brain, which is to say when I Googled it, that a lot of effort went into creating those memories. Thousands of neurons fired up so that I would remember specific incidents, recall how things looked at a particular moment, hark back to those smells and sounds. I was keenly aware how my body could be triggered, seemingly randomly, to relive a distant fear, feel a past wonder, re-experience the split wide open instance when everything in the world seemed to dissolve and there was simply the ephemeral brilliance of being.
