This Being Human

This thing called "being human" is indeed a strange, strange thing. I've been reflecting on time and its "bookends"--the one that we definitely know about (our birth date) and the one that is not yet apparent or known (our death date). Strangely, we human beings live with an awareness of both, and the time (our time on earth), is bracketed by both ends. Do the other creatures on earth live with this same realization? It seems not. Perhaps that is what makes us, in some ways at least, different and strange--even to ourselves.

An awareness of death and the "time before birth" is a very troubling awareness for us, if we pay any attention to it. Usually, I suspect, we push that awareness aside. But nonetheless, it is always there if we will but turn to it. Now if we believe that "beyond" the time-frame of space-time is actually something and not nothing, or absence, then we live in a religious milieu. If we believe it is simply nothing, non-existence, then, of course, we live differently--and one could not say that it is a particularly religious existence. So our awareness of death and what either follows it (or does not, as the case may be), determines how we live now, and that impacts us directly in how we perceive our lives and their purpose. This perception is an amazing thing to me. It changes the way we learn to live.

In this light, I am struck by one of Rumi's poems:

Separation from You threatened my life and was planning to kill me.
Time opened my eyes at last and I saw mself as an empty shell
standing in front of You.
I saw that, strangely, death is life for you
and that poverty and absence are wealth and abundance for you.
I saw that love never hesitates to draw blood
and that it has neither friends nor children.