Heroes Not Zombies

I’m always struck by comments from researchers about how many lives may be “saved” if only we would take their recommended drugs. Trouble is, you see, the total number of lives “saved” will always be zero. Drugs might alter your experience of life, but they won’t make you immortal.

As the Onion once famously proclaimed  “WHO announce – Human mortality remains stubbornly at 100%!”

We are creatures. Like other creatures on this planet. But we have evolved something special. Consciousness. With this consciousness comes both self-awareness and imagination, both of which allow us to know that we are mortal. We know we are going to die. We can imagine it. Our problem is…..how do we live with that?

I’ve just finished reading Ernest Becker’s “Denial of Death“. It’s probably one of the most challenging books I’ve ever read. He argues powerfully and convincingly that human beings have both qualities of “creatureliness” (by dint of having a body), and of “godliness” (by dint of our ability to handle symbols and to be able to imagine not just the here and now, but other times, other places and the lives of other people. In essence, we are both biological and symbolic organisms. He lays out the case that the fear of dying is at the heart of what it is to be human, that unlike other creatures which are driven by instinct, we are, instead, driven by this fear. I won’t go into detail in this post, but if you check out the link at the start of the paragraph you can read an excellent wikipedia summary of the book.

Every Saturday it seems there are people in the High Street collecting money for a charity for some disease or other – fight cervical cancer, fight breast cancer, fight diabetes, fight heart disease, fight some other disease. And what if we could for a moment conceive of a world where each, and all, of these diseases were eliminated? Would we still die?

I don’t think a fear of dying is a good basis for a life. I don’t like all the scaremongering of the “Well of Light Brotherhood” types who know with such certainty how the rest of us should be living our lives to reduce our chances of dying.

What do I believe instead?

That we should have a passion for living.

We all die. That’s a fact. It can’t be avoided but it shouldn’t be the one fact which determines how we are to live. Let’s accept our reality and do what we are here to do – live.

How passionate are you about living? What will you do TODAY to live fully and passionately?