Written in 2014.
I just lost a friend.
He was a good man, doing charity work, spearheading numerous activities and being involved in many community works. He lived in the spirit of service, despite his health condition, which had afflicted him since birth. No one could recgonise the battle he had to face each day because he was always smiling and exuding positivity. He was a good friend and a good man.
Although we hadn’t have too much opportunity to meet up ever since graduation, his death still impacted me a lot. Sometimes, we realised what we have missed only when we have lost them forever. Forever, a word, that seems foul except when it is used in fairytale endings, but forever is non-discriminatory.
I guess if I have a faith system, his death will have been much easier to handle.
It will be much easier to believe in an afterlife or heaven or rebirth. It will be most comforting to be able to know with full conviction that somehow, when everybody dies, we will all meet again in one place.
But I guess, this is when it comes to test the faith of being an atheist. I couldn’t believe in heaven, because it must have been overpopulated by now. Rebirth might be more convincing, but even if it is real, it is a distant truth. For me, I could only focus on this life, the time that I have and the plane that I am in now.
I have strong faith.
I believe that we are all forms of energy. We are made of genomes, muscles, fats, cells, electrical impulses, chemical reactions, hormones, bones and so on.
Our whole body is teeming with energy and vibrations of atoms, even when our hearts stop beating. Our spirit leave our body and there could be seemingly no sign of life.
But memories, dreams and experiences are stored onto the different locations of our bodies. We might have not been alive anymore, but our bodies remember our friends, conflicts, tears, joys, triumphs and our adventures.
As a gardener, I learn that there is no real distinction between life and death, it is actually a cycle, a smooth gradient from one to each, whereby the transition is never clearly demarcated.
Only through the existence of death could the celebration of life be made possible.
If you ask me, the one definite purpose in life for everyone, is really, to die. In our life, we could try hard to define our life purpose, but all could only have been our perception of reality. To die is our reality. Each and every day, every morning, we live a little more, and yet we also die a little bit more.
But then again, when we die, we never exactly die, as in completely cease to exist. We go back to the earth, we break down, and become part of the earth, part of the river and part of the atmosphere.
Once again, we become the source of life.
We return to where we are from, in new energy forms. Energy cannot be created or destroyed. So we are, as human beings, as a vessel of varying energies, are never truly created or destroyed. We are all in a process of conversion of energy.
So, it is the beauty of such natural law, that we could come to celebrate death.
It is precisely in death, the morphing of our memories, dreams and experiences into different material forms, that we come to surround ourselves with the spirit of life.
My faith stands, that upon death, we become the world and it is in so, that we will never die.
