"Morbid" thought for the day?

I don't think it is morbid to write about human mortality, and how our understanding of it affects the nature of our living.

Anyway, here is my Thought for the Day: There has been a lot written about near-death experiences. I don't mean narrow squeaks - you've probably had one of those on one of our roads. I mean people who flat-lined and were brought back to tell us about their mental and emotional states. People who lay dying and to some degree conscious until intervention saved them. 

(drum-roll, please)

Life itself is a near-death experience.

There you are. That's it.

Not because, or not only because, it is in physical terms more fragile and vulnerable than we sometimes like to pretend- in our part of the world, at least.

Because  we are substances that are energised into processes that live and then dissipate into other energies and processes. Former process = conception and birth, latter we call death.

That doesn't mean to say death isn't a huge mystery. But acknowledging that mystery, that power; living with death-awareness in your life; understanding and feeling the indissoluble nature of that relationship - I find that helps. It illuminates and enhances living, and helps us move towards the end of life. At least, that's what I'm finding.

Health warning - it's almost fashionable these days to write about death, funerals, grieving...I don't see that as the same as living in full awareness of the nature of life and death. It can be helpful, or it could be a subsitute for the Real Thing.

There are people who seem to live on outside of any sort of death awareness, and then keel over. Which they would need to do if their perceptions about living and dying were not to be rudely adjusted. By a lengthy terminal illness, for example.

I think for most of us, developing a relationship with the reality of our deaths is valuable and necessary as we grow older, if we are to live fully and well into old age.

There are, of course, limits. During a very busy period of my work as a funeral celebrant, I was reading bits of "The Tempest" again, following the live screening of the RSC's superb production. 

I reached Prospero's lines about going home to Milan and retiring, and he says "when every third thought shall be my grave," I caught myself thinking "only every third? Lucky old sod." 

H'mmm. Time for a rest and a little less work.