Philosophy of Life

Sometimes I feel life is such a stupid process.  They say it is our destiny to live it.  It is like there is somebody out there pulling our strings as in puppet show.  It is some sort of punishment for having been born as a human.  Sometimes when I watch Animal Planet on TV and see those wild animals just going about their business like chewing grass or lolling in the wild, they seem so serene.  It is like they know what their fate is and have a superior knowledge not evident to us humans that whatever we do nothing is going to change…that the cycle continues…that actually there is no end….that happiness, sadness, dissatisfaction are curses we humans are born with.  That creation itself is an anticlimax.  That actually death is a transient relief.  Like a siesta after a long day of work.  Like  the Hindu mantra chant Oooooommmm……. rising through the point on your navel rising through the charkas above and ringing like a tuning fork at the point between your eyebrows. 



In my first year in dental school when I was handling dissection in the Anatomy Dissection Hall I could not help wondering what it was like lying there dead and getting dissected by a bunch of morons who thought that life would go on forever.  We had named our cadaver the wounded soldier.  The wounded soldier taught us so many things.  Besides showing us the lifeless version of arteries, veins, bones, ligaments, muscles, tendons…..etc., sitting by his side after finishing our dissection activity we learnt to get comfortable with the dead and on the whole, with death itself.  It is such a shame that Medicine does not have a name for soul.  The central energy that drives the life force.  The element that differentiates the living from the dead.  And one more thing if you thought the smell of the dead was dreadful then you would be horrified by the formalin-preserved dead who make you cry when you first meet them.  Tears that are shed for the unknown dead.  But spending two hours everyday for one whole year with the formalin-preserved dead will  not only make one immune to the status of an organism called death but will teach one to face it with all respect. 



If you have watched the movie, Tuck Everlasting you might understand what I am talking about.  The words Pa Tuck says to Winnie Foster as he rows through a lake is still ringing in my head: “We are stuck like rocks beside the flowing river.”  I feel sorry for Jesse Tuck who is cursed with the helplessness of not being able to enjoy his life with the one he loves.  In a way death gives us a respite.  A respite from endless miseries.  It makes us cherish our living moments.  Death erases the old and makes way for new.  Scientifically speaking one can quote Einstein: “Energy is neither created nor destroyed, it is just changed from one form to another.”