I’m going to tell you about death, and then maybe about life. Death is directly relative to consciousness. Once an individual becomes learned about his simple existence in relation to others, he begins to understand the nature of his being and his mind begins to focus on such abstract things as purpose.

 

A lone man raised by nothing but the earth’s bearings, will never know death. He will die, like all men before him, but he will not understand his end. He will breathe, and then he will cease to breathe. Before his dying day he will experience sickness and pain, but will never imagine that he will eventually vanish entirely.

 

It is the second man who lives amongst others that understands what his life is in comparison with his inexorable death. He will see his mother and father pass, and will learn to grow tense upon passing a hospital or hearing a siren. He will essentially be surrounded by death his entire life and because of this, he will recognize the fragility of his own heartbeat.

 

To live is to die, and to understand death is to calculate the future. Upon drowning, the man who has never known death will gasp for air because he wants to live. The man who does know will gasp for air because he longs to prophesize his future. Who is better off, the man who lives for his present space in time, or the man who lives for the years that have yet to come, and is aware of his ever-nearing end?

 

And the cycle continues
And we breathe, conscious or not.