How do you feel when you think of death? What does the word, the symbol, mean to you?
For years, when I thought of death, I felt fear. Fear of the unknown, yes, but even more so the fear of not existing. Fear that my reality, my life, my memories, would someday disappear and be forgotten. I was afraid of becoming nothing. Sometimes it was just a feeling of unease lingering in the back of my mind, a queasy feeling in my stomach. At others, it was overwhelming terror. But it was constantly there, a demon haunting me that seemed impossible to escape.
This demon I struggled with. I tried to find solace with god, I prayed that Jesus would save my soul, but faith seemed no match for this perceived abyss. It was always around the corner, waiting like some silent wraith for me to make some fatal mistake. It would steal into my thoughts at night, keeping me awake. I was a slave to this concept of death, to my fear.
Finally, I began to push these thoughts aside. I realized that they were only making me miserable, so even though I had found no real solution to my dilemma, I did my best to ignore them, to drown them with drugs and alcohol, to do whatever I could to suppress them. For a while, it worked.
But my perceptions were changing. The drugs I had once sought as an escape were now helping to alter my view of the things around me. I began to question reality, as most everyone does during adolescence. By the time I hit legal adulthood, I was looking at things very differently. I still feared death, the demon was not quick to relinquish its control. But I had begun to appreciate life in ways that I never had before. I began to see beauty in things I used to think of as unremarkable, to fight against the feelings of despair and apathy that had dominated much of my young life.
Not long ago, I began experimenting with certain psychoactive substances that continued to offer me shifts in perspective. My views changed even more drastically. The process of re-evaluation that I had started in adolescence intensified, and still continues, ever more persistently. Now I find symbols and definitions of the world around me crumbling more and more, giving way to the reality that they were initially meant to represent. I find myself breaking agreements I once made with myself about the nature of the universe. I see dualities coalescing into one -- light and dark. Something and nothing. Life and death.
All at once, I find that I was never fighting a demon at all, but myself. I had looked too long and hard at the symbols and words, until I imagined that they had some deeper significance than they were meant to. I realize that this nothingness that I had feared is no more than one of these symbols, because once I stopped looking at it and looked past it instead, I found that it never existed to begin with except in my mind.
With this change in perspective my feelings regarding death are shifting from fear, to love. My fear of death is not only fading, but being replaced by an incredible sense of reverence and appreciation, one that reflects my growing love and appreciation for life. Death isn't just the price we have to pay for living. It is just as much of a gift as life, because without death there would be no place for change and rebirth.
If life is a miracle, then I think death must be as well, for I feel they are one and the same.
:) :upsidedow :) :upsidedow :) :upsidedow :) :upsidedow :) :upsidedow :) :upsidedow :) :upsidedow :) :upsidedow :) :upsidedow :) :upsidedow
