My friend and I were entertaining the idea that consciousness doesn’t just begin and end, but instead it’s cyclical. After we die, we live an anti-life that culminates by being re-born. And just like in this life we fear of dying, in that second life we fear of being re-born. We don’t know who we will be born as, and what kind of life we will have, and we spend precious time in our second life thinking about what is imminent and cannot be controlled.

We hope to be healthy, God forbid die in infancy. We hope to be born in a hospital. We don’t know what kind of family we will be born into–will my parents love each other? Will I be the youngest child in a pack of five? We dread going through puberty, being bullied in school, having our heart broken, getting the letter from the college of our dreams. Why would we subject ourselves to all this? Yet somehow we do.

Life is precious, not because someone said so or because that is the prevailing social norm, but because it makes us what we are. It’s definitely worth living. After all, we have already spent an entire previous lifetime thinking about all of it, and, hopefully, before our anti-life ended, we made peace with ourselves and with what was to come.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 5th, 2010 at 12:15 and is filed under changes/cyclical, clever, for reflection, origins, reductions. 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.