Our short life span

Yesterday it was announced that Ed Bradley , the CBS “60 minutes” host, died at age 65. Age 65 is considered rather young nowadays as many people live to their late 80s and 90s. While feeling sad for a fellow human being who passed away, I start to contemplate my own death. How soon will it be? It’s just 3 to 4 decades, given I am healthy enough or not running into any car accident (which kills more than 30,000 people a year in US).

Our life is like a flickering light bursting and disappearing in the long dark night of the cosmic history. To the universe, a million years is just a fleeting moment. As short as our life is, as  trivial as our achievement seems relative to the universe, how do we reconcile this fact with our deep pride and very meaning of our existence? How we justify the meaning of our joy, sorrow, struggle and triumph? One day, all of these will disappear as we leave this world, as our soul and body disappear.

For me, there is no after-life. Even though it might be comforting, I cannot cheat myself with lies of heaven or perpetual existence. Trained in science, I cannot believe in any existence of a soul after your body departures. Thus I am in this fear, the fear of death. Ultimately we have to come to term with such fear, accept or surrender. Our body will give away, along with our desire to live. For those who are passionate about life, how tragic it is to accept the fate of death. I remember Bertrand Russel’s description on his fear of death: one shivering consciousness looks over the rim of the world into the cold unfathomable lifeless abyss. I remember the eloquent Chinese writer Ba Jin describe his agony of mortality while he was still young. He wrote page after page his rejection, anger and anxiety of future death. But there is no use. Now I realize this is a fight that we can never win. Of course, humans have made significant stride in prolonging our life span from average 40 to close to 80. Maybe one day we will make it into 160 and even 200. But still it is a limited and short life span in a cosmic scale.

For the next thousand years, humans will still try to grip with their mortality and come to term with it. There will be billions of souls leaving this world with sadness, as billions who have gone before us.

Knowing the inevitable, I will live my life to its fullest. Every outcome will lead to the same outcome, so what is to be feared? Every path will lead to the same path, so what is to be hesitant for? To live is to love and immerse in joy, it is to achieve the state of highest energy. It is reaching freedom, right now and right here.