You Choose Your Story

When you get to a certain age you start to think about death.  It's as natural as birth and as inevitable as the sunrise.  Fearing it is instinctual but in so many ways pointless.  As a young man I would happily walk on high roofs, ride motorbikes at ridiculous speeds, climb cliffs with no safety gear and dive into the sea from heights that now make me feel nauseous. 

Today I hate heights, never climb cliffs and I haven't ridden a motorbike since my last accident a couple of years ago (though I intend to get my bike out again soon but I will be a lot more careful in future).

Everyday we all get twenty four hours closer to our eventual demise.  It might be a day, a week, a month or years away but it will come.  Of course Witnesses believe that they will live forever and even if they die at some point they will be resurrected to everlasting life.

We all know that is sheer fantasy but we could fall into the same trap as them.  They don't care about life now because they think there is a better life 'around the corner', which is why they waste so much time in field ministry, meetings, bible study, assemblies and volunteering. 

We don't have that excuse.  We all know that this life is the only life. Nature cares not a jot about what we do with our one opportunity but at the end of it our cells become a part of nature once again. No consciousness, no feelings, no emotions - nature will just use the cells we have now to integrate with billions of others and create plants, soil, insects, mammals, reptiles and millions of other life forms.  We won't know a thing about it.  Don't believe me?  Just ask yourself what you remember before you were born?

Before your parents had the sex that created you, your cells were in the food they ate, the earth that food grew in, the animals that died to give them meat and anything else that entered their bodies.

So we have a very limited time to do something in this world, while we are conscious, sentient beings.

We can spend it bemoaning the fact that we wasted so much of our lives in the service of the Governing Body of Jehovahs Witnesses.  We can spend it regretting not gaining a University degree or studying to enter a trade.  We can even spend it pointing fingers at the religion and blame them for ruining our lives.

All of that just wastes our lives even further.  The past is the past - its gone and there is nothing we can do to change it.  Now is the time to start living.  Start the business you always promised yourself, write the novel, apply for the TV quiz show, leave the idiot you're with and make a better life with the person you really love.  Go to the places you really want to visit, lose the weight you keep promising yourself, buy those shoes, tell your daughter you love her (even though you hate her the tattoos), get a tattoo, stop drinking, start drinking, smoke weed, tell an elder to go fuck himself, do a bungee jump, jump out of a perfectly serviceable plane with a parachute on your back, admit you're gay and accept the life nature made for you, join the club, take the holiday, get the haircut, build those muscles, buy that ridiculous car, sell everything and travel the world, give your kids the money to buy a house, accept the fact you have absolutely nothing and you are still happy.

Nature doesn't give a shit what you do with your life.  It just gives you life and sometime later it takes it away.  What you do in the middle is down to you.