Oh, if we died today, will we live once more?

I once read a quote. It said, “To live, you must die,” and I believe that sums up my entire life… and maybe yours. However, I must be presumptuous and rewrite those words in mine, for I say, “To truly live, you must die, but only when you know you have died.” We have died a couple of times, but if we were truly keeping count, it could have been a bit more, maybe a couple tens of times. It may not have been all at once, surely not the overarching, defining moment like a hero in a story, where the arc screams and the plot all points to a building climax.

I think our first death happens very slowly, unbecoming, and probably brought to us by a familiar face, or with a smile and luring words. Our first death comes long before we have known what it truly is, before we are sentient of anything. To give an example would mean uniformity, but no death comes the same, and this is not any different.

Death, such a scary word, but if we truly looked at it, I would say it was comforting. “A permanent stop,” it truly means. Soothing, one might say if being Panglossian, but would that be abjectly wrong? For if we could wield death, then would we not get all we wanted? A permanent stop to not finding a dream, to not having a great job, to not having the love of our life, to having pain; a definite means to an end.

I say we desire to live; in fact, it is all we ever dream of, various apparitions of a life we want, a dream we have, one we need. We fight and we struggle desperately for the time we can live, to be truly alive, blood pumping and adrenaline taking charge of our being, and it is so audacious or is it desperate? that even when we desire to die, we seek to live.

I fear we misconstrue what it means to be alive and to be dead. For the two states are very intertwined, and many of us die long before we are gone. A permanent stop to one dream, another to a connection, one more to a long-held wish. Over and over again, there is a definite end to that which we desire, to that which we dream of, and with it goes a bit of our being. With it comes our long, drawn death, albeit in our own cluelessness. And one day, it takes the most of us with it, and we wonder if we ever truly lived.

So I ask, If we had nothing and we knew we had nothing, would we die? If death is a permanent stop and an empty, then is nothing death or life?

If we knew we were dead, like the phoenix who is aware of its own demise and builds its pyre awaiting rebirth, would we not now get to live?