... back to the basics via a half-dozen decades and then some ? ...
we are born crying, wrinkly, naked, incontinent, bald, toothless, and helpless.
it’s just cute then.
we die in pretty much that exact same state. yet those who had to see us ‘whole’ find this change much harder to face than our ‘blossoming’.
we humans are odd creatures. we spend much of our allotted lifetime concerned with something we have no control over: getting older. we may think we fear death itself, but deep down, i’m sure that’s not all of it.
perhaps we would rather just avoid the final cosmic joke of seeing all our ‘efforts’ on this earth go into rewind before our very eyes as we age and ‘fall apart’.
after all that effort to grow up, learn stuff, be independent and keep ourselves ‘youthful’, we all end up fighting daily to avoid going back to the state from whence we came.
we waste time until we realise that time is not ours to waste. time is wasting us, and all we might do to stop it is to realise that we can’t. regardless of our ‘importance’ on this earth, we are designed to die, and die we will.
the maturation of a young person into an adult is often marked by a joyous celebration acknowledging their independence and ‘coming of age’. this is viewed as a ‘natural’ progression of life.
yet we view with fear and sometimes even disgust the onset of the final natural process than will reverse these changes and gradually bring an end to our lives, even though it is just another part of the same never-ending process.
and we humans cling sadly to our ‘shell’, still thinking maybe that this is all there is, yet somehow also desperately hoping that there’s more.