Quotes Tagged "death"
I pondered the significance of my personal annihilation for the next several months, facing down an existentialist abyss of oblivion and meaningless within me. Eventually, through some unconscious process of recalibration, I returned to my basic attitude that all is as it should be. There is no other way I can describe it: no mountaintop conversion or flash of deep insight, but a sentiment that suffuses my life. I wake up each morning to find myself in a world full of mystery and beauty. And I'm profoundly thankful for the wonder of it all. Here I am, a highly organized pattern of mass and energy, one of seven billion, insignificant in any objective accounting of the world. And in short while I will case to exist. What am I to the universe? Practically nothing. Yet the certainty of my death makes my life more significant. My joy in life, in my children, my love to dogs, running and climbing, books and music, the cobalt blue sky, are meaningful because I will come to an end. And that is as it should be. I do not know what will come afterward, if there is an afterward in the usual sense of the world, but whatever it is, I know in my bones that everything is for the best.