No man standing where the horizon of a life has touched a grave has the right to prophesy a future full of pain and tears. It may be that death gives everything of value to life. If those who press and press against our hearts could never die, perhaps that love would wither from the earth. Perhaps a common faith will crush the weeds of selfishness from the paths between our hearts, and I prefer to live and love where death reigns than to have eternal life where love does not reign.
Robert Green Ingersoll, Prayer at a Child’s Grave, 1882
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Introduction: Recognize the Fundamentals
Being born is a bit like receiving a double verdict from a jury despite having done nothing to deserve it. The double verdict: life imprisonment and death penalty.
With life imprisonment, you are given the opportunity, for variable lengths of time, to inhabit with consciousness and a body under the sun and stars. If you are favored by random good fortune in lotteries from family, place, genetics, and other variables that affect the extent and quality of love, happiness, freedom, knowledge, joy, and wonder you experience , you could have a glorious journey that will last for many decades. . If you are not so favored, you may have very few or none of such experiences. Your destiny could be uninterrupted hunger and deprivation, pain and rejection, slavery and unmitigated misery. There is no rhyme or reason that can explain why some babies are born into lives of health and advantage with prospects of longevity and prosperity, while others are born into misery and disease, misery, ignorance and wrong. As Ingersoll noted in the speech referenced above (delivered just a few feet from the graves shown below in the Congressional Cemetery in Washington, DC on January 12, 1882):
Every cradle asks where from, every coffin withers. The poor barbarian who weeps over his dead can answer the question as substantively and satisfactorily as the robed priest of the truest creed. The tearful ignorance of the one is as consoling as the wise, meaningless words of the other.
But, it’s just a journey: whether rich and loved, poor and ignored or anywhere in between, life’s journey doesn’t last long. What’s more, you can’t go back in circles, there are no second chances, even if really bad things happen along the way.
These factors are as capricious as significant. You have little to no choice, particularly in the first decade or so. Everything just happens, like the Big Bang. Don’t take it personally. This is how things are, for you in the present time period and how it has been for the 200,000 plus years of our lineal ancestors. Furthermore, there is little chance that it will ever be otherwise.
Consequently, it is better for you to focus on the fact that you are here and that the time of your life is now. It’s probably been on the road for a few decades, given that you’re reading this. I hope things went well, for the most part. Now, more than ever, you have the opportunity to make decisions that could improve the quality of your life experience as you move toward the end.
Death, the waiting room and exuberance and freedom
Let me go over some basic facts, starting with an idea I’ve had for a long time. That idea is that we all need to have more orgasms, and we should have them in a way that isn’t diminished by guilt, worry, fear, and other forms of lack of joy and positivity. I want to promote wellness orgasms or WO. These are much more than the other type. A WO is just a joyous experience, both mentally and physically, most of the time.
Life must be full of OTs, multiple OTs, throughout each day. You don’t need pills to have them when you get old. A synonym for WO is DBRU, an acronym created after a classic Gary Larson cartoon “Far Side.” I don’t want to go off topic here, but you can find what you need to know about this in essays on WO and CANTDOIT and REAL wellness at Seekwellness. Everyone should encourage clearer thinking about death, WOs, and the REAL wellness mindset.
Start with the idea contained in this Richard Dawkins quote. Think of being destined to die as a small price to pay for the opportunity it gives you: to live. What a wonder: whether in a world of favorable circumstances or even rather bleak ones, to have life, even briefly, is a marvel. Those of us who live, almost anywhere and at almost any time, are lottery winners. For many, unfortunately, that lucky break will not seem like a blessing, but for many, it surely seems like it and it is.
This perspective aligns somewhat with the REAL wellness dimensions of both exuberance and freedom. Lessening or even eliminating the fear of death removes a barrier to exuberance. However, accepting death, including the acknowledgment of a past or afterlife, is a liberation. This emancipation from religiously induced fear is a quintessential freedom.
A WO perspective on death
Everyone is filling time while waiting to die. You can think of all of us gathered in the waiting room, moving around, reading things, trying to keep ourselves busy if not entertained. Granted, it’s not a very happy thought, but it’s true and there doesn’t have to be anything less than happy or moody about it.
We all know there isn’t much time left on the clock, but the game continues, so we don’t give up or stop doing something, maybe in a rage or dealing with the dying of the light. (Thanks, Dylan Thomas.) Most of us, except maybe undertakers, don’t like to think about it, so we look for distractions. That’s the ticket: busy things that help us feel worthwhile and keep our minds off our impending demise. One of the common ways we do this is by agreeing and even adopting bizarre representations of how we and everything else came to be. Belief systems, varied and contradictory, all claiming to be the only true religion. We are offered revealed truths (which, conveniently, cannot be verified) and prodigious myths that explain what one god or another wants from us. We also learn what he/she or it will do to us, when we are dead, if we don’t obey, love and serve the one true god (guess right or otherwise) correctly while we are alive. It doesn’t matter that there’s no evidence of any of that. Billions still believe every word or a selective sample of words from one religion or another.
Well, they tell us and themselves that they do, but I suspect most of them just believe in believing, and are having a hard time doing so.
On what basis do you believe these things? There is only one base and no other: faith. FaithAs Mark Twain pointed out, you believe what you know is not so. Faith has been explained as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.
Despite our intelligence, we accept madness, a fact not lost on countless observers, including Aldous Huxley:
You never see animals going through the absurd and often horrible nonsense of magic and religion… Donkeys don’t bray a liturgy under clear skies. Nor do cats attempt, by abstinence from cat meat, to induce the feline spirits to benevolence. Only man behaves with such gratuitous madness. It’s the price he has to pay for being smart but not smart enough yet.
Of course, a lot of the busy stuff is finding a way to survive to pass our DNA on to the next unfortunate group, who passes their DNA on to the next group, and so on, forever until who knows when.
We try to make sense of our existence when there is no sense at all. We come to earth by chance, in unchosen settings, with no predetermined purpose, do as we’re told, and sit in the Waiting Room until it’s time to leave. All of our personal achievements provide momentary pleasure, but are meaningless in the larger cosmic sense.
The good news
So here’s the good news from a WO perspective. Once we get past all the stages of thinking about death and dying, we can start living on our own terms, enjoying our momentary existence and refusing to take orders from the guards in the waiting room. Paraphrasing Michel Onfray’s Atheist Manifesto, some of us prefer irreverent, radical, cynical, hedonistic, sensualist, scientific, and voluptuous philosophers and comedians to bishops, popes, rabbis, imams, ayatollahs, and mullahs.
Why be cloistered in thought or action by other people who want to control your meaningless existence? Why accept their rules, if you can create your own without infringing on the rights of others? You’ll be dead soon, so now is the time to play your own game. It’s time to ignore the forces of bureaucracy, politics, marketing, and religion to do what makes you happy, enthusiastic, and exuberant, as long as it’s legal, considerate, and doesn’t interfere with your neighbors’ happiness. I agree with Ingersoll that everyone should be as happy as he can be, as long as he is not happy at the expense of another, and no properly constituted person can be happy at the expense of another.
The certainty of death and the meaninglessness of life invite us to freely engage in the OTs that are pursued with joy.
It’s time to cheer in the Waiting Room. It’s time to do what you want to do, aware but not controlled or inhibited by friends, family, teachers, legislators, priests, priests or gods.
That’s the beauty of life that happens randomly. You can either wait quietly or make a fuss, which might bring more pleasure to others than just going along. As in Ingersoll’s The Improved Man, your greatest joy can come from the love of those whose lives you have enriched.
Andy Rooney put it this way:
We should all understand that we are alone. Believing in Santa doesn’t hurt kids for a few years, but it’s not smart for them to keep waiting their whole lives for him to come down the chimney with something wonderful. Santa Claus and God are cousins.