Life, Death, Old Age

I was having a really interesting convo with my dad on msn, and yes, I CHAT with my dad on msn, we are several thousand miles away from each other and after all it’s the 21st century innit (spoken with a makeshift Canadio-British™ accent)? Anyway, it was quite an interesting confabulation (muhahaha had to use this con-fabulous word!, okay sorry enough cheese); we spoke about many things, first about a life-long friend he’d just reunited with and with whom he shared nearly everything—literally, carbon copies of each other, the poetry, the art, the same blood type… errmm things which I also have completely in common with my dad, …err hate to say it, but its nearly like father like son in many cases. And as my high-school teacher Mr. Laggis used to say, more often then some of his students liked … “I digress”.

The colloquy (ooo another one, muhahah) took its pace as we ventured into the morbid realms of death and old age…both of which we agreed weren’t always passages of life the children of Adam wanted to pass through…And why should we long to pass through them, even amid the worst of quagmires, we love life. We really do, and we love it with a sort of insatiable passion. We savour it and eagerly hanker for more of it, through money, power, pleasure; what ever strokes and seemingly intensifies our existence. As for those of us who’ve contemplated the abominable; suicidally ‘taking’ our lives—cowering and relinquishing our life in an inner crescendo of frustration. To be sure, many of us have been there, some more critically than others and as wrong as it is, it’s never committed because we truly loath the prospect of life.

No.

Rather, we do it because we love life so much that we cannot bear to see it deficient and seemingly absent of all that of which we deeply desire of life, be it love, power, worldly success; the desires are apparently many, but they are really one. We desire life, in the richest of its forms; a life of lasting peace and of contentment. That’s what rabidly resonates in our soul—the money, the power, the pleasure are no more then transient tastes of what we truly desire. A few dollars might lend a few moments of fleeting peace but just as those dollars are spent so too are those few moments of peace—lasting far less then what we truly desire.

Despite the daunting spectre of death and old age, are they not passages toward that greater life—the one we so fervently desire? For our desires are clearly ‘not of this world’ since this world defiantly betrays our desires time and time again—as it banters our unquenchable thirst for life. So if our scales are fair why not long for that eternal abode? And if they are weighty what else is there but to seek redemption and turn in penitence. A kind of tender irony, as God further directs us toward that which we desire; since death becomes an inescapable misfortune, life an endless pit of self-ruin and penitence the only retreat from our misery. And of old-age what more of an invitation to repentance can one ask for?

“What is the life of this world but amusement and play? but verily the abode of the Hereafter,- that is life indeed, if they but knew.” The Quran (29:64)