Inexorable

That's an interesting word, isn't it? "Inexorable." At its most basic level, it simply means "unstoppable." But it evokes much more than that, at least to me. It's the unflagging, ceaseless, indefatigable procession of an event, and seems to be used most frequently with the concept of the passage of time. A song by Anna Nalick has a line, "Life's like an hourglass glued to the table." What a great lyric. The grains of sand keep trickling down, and you can't invert the hourglass. She continues, "No one can find the rewind button now." Inexorable.

It's long since been clear to me that there are three, and only three, possibilities of what happens to us when we die. One possibility is that there is an afterlife, whether it's heaven, hell, purgatory, the second ring of Saturn, whatever. Our physical body dies, our spirit continues living. A second prospect is that of reincarnation, the rebirth of our soul. The remaining choice is that death is final; that our time in this world is finite and this life is not a test, not a proving ground, not a preparation for bigger and better things, but that this is indeed it.

That final possibility is one that's been intriguing me of late. What if the time we spend here on Earth is truly all we get? It definitely makes sense that, if there is no God, no afterlife, no greater good, that we'd create the concepts in our minds and collective culture. It's very comforting. To think that this life is our only shot is a frightening prospect. Indeed, most of the world's religions are based upon one of the other two possibilities of what happens when we die. But any objective person will surely concede that the third option, that death is final in every sense of the word, must be considered as a distinct possibility.

Beyond being a somewhat disquieting thought, the notion that we have no destiny beyond the time we spend here can also be profoundly liberating. Think about it -- we all know we're going to die, even if we don't embrace or even genuinely accept it. It's utterly inescapable. Human beings are supposedly the only living creatures that have the foreknowledge, even from a young age, that life is finite and that each of us, all of us will one day perish. Death is truly the great equalizer. But for almost everyone, the notion of our own death is so abstract, it's almost a paradox. "I'll die one day," we think, "eventually." In our minds, "one day" is a far-off, unnamed day in the distant future.

So what if you knew in advance the actual day of your own death? What if you knew you had exactly 5,229 days left to live? It's not a short time, but it's not that long in the grand scheme of things, either, just a bit over 14 years. That's probably still far enough off in the future to be pretty hard to grasp, though. It's less than half the time most of us pay on our mortgages. But would you live your life differently if you had a countdown? Maybe, maybe not.

But what if that number were substantially reduced? What if the date of your death was 351 days from now? Just under a year. One more Christmas. Your next birthday would be your last. Each season that passed would be the last one you would live to see. Would you change your day-to-day mode of living? Of course you would. Most of us would quit our jobs, certainly. Travel. Spend time with loved ones. Make a difference in our community or in the world at large. Help propel humanity to be even just a little better. Really live our lives. We would, as Thoreau wrote, live deliberately and suck all the marrow out of life. We'd make each and every day truly count.

So the prospect of death can be frightening... but it can also be liberating.

In the face of the inexorable march of time, the death sentence to which every one of us will fall prey... we can fear death or we can embrace life. While they sound as if they could be complementary, they're almost inevitably going to be mutually exclusive. It's an interesting way to think.