What is death? This is a rather easy question to answer. It is whatever is devoid of life.
But then, what is life?
I recently downloaded Bumble because I like to go swiping for a hobby as we know. And it’s an interesting way (until it’s not) of meeting interesting people (until they’re not).
This one guy asked me what “life” is in my perspective.
If you follow my Instagrams, you would’ve seen the following:
Upon thinking about the question once more, here is my current belief as of September 13, 2024, 3:21 P.M. EST:
Life consists of:
- Existing – This is the easiest term to define here. Existing is simply that. When you are born (or in fact, when you are conceived), you exist. It is what biologists and other scientists would consider “alive”.
- Surviving – Surviving is the action of preserving and continuing to exist. In other words, surviving is to avoid death. While it may seem as though this is an active action, it can also be passive. If you’re still biologically alive post-conception/post-birth, you exist and thus you have survived. In many ways, surviving precedes existing from the moment of conception and/or birth.
- Living – This is the complicated one. The philosophical one. The subjective one. I choose to believe that to truly live is to want to live. And where does that want come from?
To be honest, it isn’t as simple as I wrote in to the Bumble guy. What does living my truth even mean? For one, everyone’s truth is different. And aren’t there those that are live just fine through lies and deception and withholding their truths as well? Or maybe, that then is their truth. The last line of Antonya Nelson’s short story “Or Else” that I had to read for one of my grad school classes recently suddenly somehow makes a lot more sense.
“It was a lie—or else, it wasn’t” suddenly makes a lot more sense.
But here’s something that made immediate sense to me:
A friend of mine, someone who is growingly become someone I respect more than most (which says a lot because I can like, I can love, I can fall in love, I can lust, I can care and trust all before I ever, ever in a million years truly respect someone), said the following last Friday night, a time when sometimes good things do happen:
He told me that to have a death wish doesn’t mean you want to die. It means you want to live life to the fullest, unafraid of consequence, including death.
Maybe that’s what living is?
If to exist is to exist, to survive is to continue existing and to avoid death, perhaps to live is to embrace life unafraid of death?
Yes, living is embracing life, unafraid of death.
How ironic?
It seems, irony is the strongest mark on my life, always. But that, is a story for another time.
– Samhi C.
