Death is not the opposite of life but an innate part of it!

Reading is a kind of meditation in itself. It makes you observe, reflect, infer and come with some conclusions that may answer some of our questions about life. After reading and while travelling and getting to know people of the same age as mine, it attracted my attention that we -youth- are more concerned about the idea of existence and why we are living, why now, why here? etc rather than what will we do to ensure a future of successful materialistic life. We have more or less accepted the harsh fact that life is hard and it needs strong will to survive. We understand that life is not divided between “good” people and “bad” people or good and evil because even “good”, “bad” and “evil” have their own proportionate definitions that differ from time to time and from a place to another. We realize that there is a “beyond”; something more deep and different that we can’t really describe but we can feel. Something like a parallel universe or a place somewhere where our souls and minds visit at night, and when we wake up we don’t remember anything, but the feeling is still there. So, for example, instead of asking “how governments cheat?” or “what is the cycle of life?”, we start to ask “why the organization of the state is presented primarily in its government?” “Why governments put their survival against their people’s survival?” because primarily governments are there for the sake of people not the other way around. “Why the system shows a failure?” or “Is it a conspiracy theory plan held by unseen powers in the universe?”.

Julian Landini

“Why the life cycle starts from there -as scientists claim- not the other way around?” “Why we exist?” “Does the failure of knowing the reason beyond our existence mean we don’t really exist?” or should we ask “Why existence includes us in the equation?”.The other day I was reading for Murakami -a famous Japanese novelist- his book Norwegian Wood and he stated a sentence that created an echo in between my stored unanswered thoughts corner of my mind. He said ” Death is not the opposite of life but an innate part of it. By living our lives, we nurture death”. Immediately, images of earthquakes, volcanoes, floods, murders, wars and thousands of victims came to my mind with the question “who said death is a bad phenomenon?” “Who said taking the soul from the body is a bad thing?” Maybe freeing the soul from the prison of the body is a marvelous thing that only people who “died” know about it. Maybe our inability to understand the idea that the body that was alive and moving yesterday can not move anymore, makes us terrified of the idea of “inability” itself not “death”. The inability to understand, the inability to answer all our questions, the inability of knowing what will happen tomorrow actually terrifies us. But that doesn’t give us the right to accuse “death” of our ignorance because sometimes the answer is directly in front of our eyes but we fear coming close, touch it and open it wide enough for the whole world to see. Maybe death has been trying to tell us something but continuously we keep accusing it without even listening. Elders sometimes say “What is hidden is supposed to be hidden forever!”, but do you agree?

These thoughts always make me turn back to the question of “soul”, because seriously where does it wander around every night in a way that makes me at unease when I wake up with thousands of unanswered questions every morning? Murakami comes again to answer part of this question saying “Whatever it is you’re seeking won’t come in the form you’re expecting.” So, if we get to know the answer of our own soul and how we can free it, I think then we can make it fly away out of the universe to get the unknown answers beyond and come back to tell us. It’s a kind of metaphysical symbolic storm that we have to pass through in order to transport to the other side of the clear truth. Murakami puts his touch here saying “And you really will have to make it through that violent, metaphysical, symbolic storm. No matter how metaphysical or symbolic it might be, make no mistake about it: it will cut through flesh like a thousand razor blades. People will bleed there, and you will bleed too. Hot, red blood. You’ll catch that blood in your hands, your own blood and the blood of others. And once the storm is over you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, in fact, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about.”

Zhou Fan