Writer's Block: Forever young
Dec. 11th, 2009 05:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tabular_rasa[Error: unknown template qotd]
Well, since the world's ending in 2012 anyway . . . Kidding. No, I wouldn't. It's like that whole Tuck Everlasting/Peter Pan/Harry Potter "death is the next great adventure" thing.
I'm actually really curious about death. What if the afterlife is a million times better than this, would you want to stay here forever? Yet even if all we do is "turn off," I'm cool with that. I think life would eventually get to be really boring. A lot of very old people express a kind of world-weariness that suggests they're ready for release. A lot of that is their atrophying bodies and the deaths of their friends, but after a while physically being alive is very tedious and tiring: the endless cycles of eat, excrete, sleep. There is a lot of magic in being alive, what with all the places and cultures, the beauty of nature, and human emotions like love and grief, but I think after hundreds of years even that would begin to feel repetitive. I wonder if the human mind is only meant to be "on" for so long-- just long enough to appreciate it. (In Buddhism, the human lifespan is considered ideal for reaching nirvana-- long enough to grasp it, but short enough to appreciate the transience).
I might consider if it I were struck down with a terminal illness very young in life, so that I never get to experience aging, either, but *knock on wood* I seem to be okay right now. I would also consider it if everybody were doing it, too, perhaps-- if everyone I loved was going to lock themselves into chambers of ice right now and leave me to live out the last of my life alone. Then I'd just freeze myself to join them in the future, and perhaps just live out my life from there. But I don't think I really want to live forever.
Edit (5:28 pm): Oh wow, I wrote down my music choice without even reading the automatically-generated subject for this prompt O.o Haha.
Well, since the world's ending in 2012 anyway . . . Kidding. No, I wouldn't. It's like that whole Tuck Everlasting/Peter Pan/Harry Potter "death is the next great adventure" thing.
I'm actually really curious about death. What if the afterlife is a million times better than this, would you want to stay here forever? Yet even if all we do is "turn off," I'm cool with that. I think life would eventually get to be really boring. A lot of very old people express a kind of world-weariness that suggests they're ready for release. A lot of that is their atrophying bodies and the deaths of their friends, but after a while physically being alive is very tedious and tiring: the endless cycles of eat, excrete, sleep. There is a lot of magic in being alive, what with all the places and cultures, the beauty of nature, and human emotions like love and grief, but I think after hundreds of years even that would begin to feel repetitive. I wonder if the human mind is only meant to be "on" for so long-- just long enough to appreciate it. (In Buddhism, the human lifespan is considered ideal for reaching nirvana-- long enough to grasp it, but short enough to appreciate the transience).
I might consider if it I were struck down with a terminal illness very young in life, so that I never get to experience aging, either, but *knock on wood* I seem to be okay right now. I would also consider it if everybody were doing it, too, perhaps-- if everyone I loved was going to lock themselves into chambers of ice right now and leave me to live out the last of my life alone. Then I'd just freeze myself to join them in the future, and perhaps just live out my life from there. But I don't think I really want to live forever.
Edit (5:28 pm): Oh wow, I wrote down my music choice without even reading the automatically-generated subject for this prompt O.o Haha.
