Ming’s Wisdom

I was cutting my nails after watering the plants in the garden, and thinking about the cycle of life, the interactions between plants, fungi, bacteria, and animals, and how they eat each other (after death or during life from shedding) to survive, and how each kingdom nourishes the other kingdoms.

So I happened on the thought of what happens when you’re killed in nature by another animal, and you die. You are no longer conscious. you no longer know the pain it was to have been killed. You forget everything. And this was a sudden shock to me, the true realization of what death is. It felt like the soul was taken out of me.

But the one thought that could console me was the fact that the molecules of my body would still exist, and they would nourish the rest of the world and all of its living things, and my molecules would help to sustain a whole ecosystem of living organisms, and I would technically still be alive, thriving in fact, though animal, plant, fungus, bacteria, I wouldn’t know which i’d be in.

Now I think that philosophers have so often thought about death and were extremely afraid of it, but really they are missing the next step, the realization that the amazing miracle of billions of molecules of this earth came together in just the right configuration to give them, even though it’s for such a short period of time, the valuable present of life and consciousness. It really is a present that you never asked for, and never did anything to earn it, yet extraordinary effort was put into aligning those billions of molecules to give you such a present, simply because. So we really should be very appreciative of this life that we hold, and be super thankful to whoever decided to put in such effort to give it to us.

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 9th, 2010 at 13:44 and is filed under Happiness. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.