Death

(A chapter in YOU HAVE UPSET THE BALANCE OF THE UNIVERSE BY BEING BORN: Advice on How to Live by Dr Robert MacLean, PhD: http://robertmaclean.blogspot.com/p/you-have-upset-balance-of-universe-by.html. Watch this space for the next one.)
  
    The first thing to be aware of is that it's all right to die.  It's OK.
    It's not something you want to plan for your weekend but when it's time to shuffle off into the not-know you just have to do it.
    You've seen it coming.  Your reflection in the darkened bathroom mirror as, drunk, you pull up your pants in profile, your own ghost.  Pings in the robot.  Sooner of later something goes and then—boop!—so do you.
    It's all right!
    You're going to live forever, don't worry.
    I wish I could tell you the ground of these feelings but I can't.  I have to fall back on the fact that I want to tell you—that I want to tell you that and not something else.  Not much to go on, is it?  No, it isn't.  Forget it.
    You will pass into an arena of competition and hierarchy even drearier than the one known to you here.
    And between these two poles—the anything-anytime uncertainty and the intuition of your immortality—you.  No possible moral code (see MORALITY), no guarantee, not even an indication, a sign.  Just you, and the riddle of the three score and ten.  Four legs in the morning, two legs at noon, three in the evening.
    How can you be anything but wrong?  What among all the wrong human things isn't wrong?  Let us be gloriously wrong!  The only other choice is to be ingloriously wrong.  Everything can be taken two ways, every piece of evidence can lift or depress you.  Can we hope that the starving are numbed to their pain, that the sick secrete chemicals to protect them, that the hunted animal is sealed safely in its panic?  You may have to die to accept life.
    Meanwhile you know things you don't know.  You pass between all chances.  Your ignorance, a beautiful dignity.

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