Death be not proud

As I've mentioned multiple times before, my favorite album in the entire world is Explosions in the Sky's The Earth Is Not A Cold Dead Place. When I gave it a running diary at the beginning of this school year, I mentioned the heartbeat in "First Breath After Coma." But now, I've come to know a different part of that song, from 2:27-4:24, where the drums are heavy in a way that kind of just perpetuates itself. Maybe I'll reach other points in the album along this blog post, but what I have to say doesn't have as much to do with music as I've led you to believe so far.

I've had an interesting relationship with the fact that one day, I will inevitably die. I've been mortified by it, I've progressed through some stages-of-grief-type sequence with it, I've regressed, I've blogged...at this point, it's something that's more fun to talk about than it is actually frightening. And I think it's because I've taken hold of this fact. What once scared the hell out of me is motivation now. The motivation behind this is knowing that what is happening right now is real. Maybe this isn't real to you -- maybe this is a test, an audition. Maybe it's one life out of many that we will live. I don't know if any of these are true. And I, like everyone else, won't find out until we greet death. But until then, I know that acknowledging the realness that is this life is a hell of a lot better than anything else I could do.

But what comes with acknowledging this realness, is acknowledging the absence of realness. And this is something that happened to me, something that led to the mortifying truth that it would happen one day. But right now, I want to make this lack of realness real. I want you to give it a shot, too. Lay in bed, sit in a comfy chair, close your eyes, and try and hone in on what it feels like to have utter nonexistence. Complete lack of consciousness. Try to picture the universe without you in it. Try to picture what your universe would be once you leave this one.

That is the feeling that this is all real. Not only to acknowledge that we are real in the present, but that we will not be real in the future. That we will be precisely unreal in the future. But that feeling, that realness-of-unrealness, is absolutely okay. We'll all go through it eventually, but that's okay. To understand that we will not exist is, to me, the greatest level of cognition regarding our existence as such.

And death shall be no more; death, thou shalt die.
 -John Donne