The End of Dreams

The End of Dreams

by Peter Shikli
18 May 2010

With the death of my mom a few months ago, I find myself musing about mortality. Mom was never a fearless person, yet she did not fear death. I believe it's nature's plan to pain us only to motivate us to run away. Whether by God's mercy or nature's penchant to avoid the pointless, we seem to fear death only while young.

So it is that I started trying to list the valid reasons to fear death, not just the ones dictated by instinct. If we prize our free will and our ability to shape our destiny, we need a reason beyond the mindless dictate of our genes exploiting us as survival machines.

The first reason to cross off the list was the pain of death. We spend our lives inflicting pain upon every available nerve ending we own, including the emotional ones, so one last serving shouldn't be a big deal. Watching the advances of modern medicine, we as a species have clearly gotten the upper hand as far as the pain of death goes.

Next to be discarded was the longing for friends and relatives. Saying good-by to leave on a journey is always hard, particularly one where we may not meet again. But to keep living while friends and children died around us, that would not be better.

Then I thought of the end of our memories, our effect on the world, the end of our ego, our will to dominate. The Buddha's and Sidhartha's submersion of their self, their discovery that it is better to be some unknown part of a great being than to be every part of a known but inconsequential being. Witnessing my parents grow old, both seemed to discover the inner peace that comes from slowly trading in the self in order to participate in a great cosmic club. Whereas my father seemed to go knowingly, savoring the introspection and wisdom derived from it, my mother just went with the feelings without knowing why. She grew to feel more at peace, more able to love, more unassailable by life's setbacks. All my life, I assumed old folks retired from our fast-paced life because their bodies could no longer stand the pace. Now I surmise they do so by choice, perhaps because of what they learn on the treadmill.

Venturing into the spiritual, I almost came across a logical reason in favor of death, but the country music singer Kenny Chesney pulls the plug on thousands of years of religious marketing. "Everybody wants to go to heaven," he croons, "but nobody wants to go right now".

So much unfinished business in my own life, unfulfilled career aspirations, a persistent lack of understanding about why I am here. Perhaps with a bit more time, I could come closer to the end of my to-do list? My need goes beyond leaving a legacy, though that self-serving angle is there as well, but I have been so blessed with talent and opportunity, it seems I should have made a better showing to serve whoever made me and whatever he expects of me. On my other shoulder, the little red guy says this is all just the inbred guilt of my Catholic upbringing. On balance, I am pursuing my enlightenment, at least within my own measure, so if the big guy pulls my plug, he does have to share responsibility for me stopping work on my assignment.

All this talk of religion, and I put my finger on it; faith, that is the reason to fear death. Not just faith in God, though I will return to that, but in everything else we believe. In my other blog, Faith and Facts, I show how deeply men of science are really men of faith, including the athiests. The realization is that we don't need to look to Einstein to see his faith in relativity before it became fact. We can imagine the faith a Neanderthal had in his hunt being able to feed his family, the faith we have in ourselves that is strong enough to get us out of bed every morning, and the faith we have in a future -- but only if we live into the future. We are creatures of faith. Facts are from the past, and hardly a reason to live or die, notwithstanding the loonies living only to settle past scores. Once we turn a faith into a fact, we must produce another faith or our reason to exist into the future is over. As soon as Einstein realized relativity was a fact, he left it behind and dedicated his life to his new faith in (against) quantum mechanics. From the moment of our first breath, each of us has faith in our mother. So it grows until our last breath.

Only when I heard Stevie Wonder's "Castles in the Sand" did I realize what happens to faith, our essence, when we die, "all dreams must come to an ending." Stevie Wonder wasn't talking about day dreaming, but the dreams and visions that give us vitality. That is the problem with death. We meet God, and we need believe no more. The wonder and beauty of it all is supposed to be better than having faith, better than having something worth doing, better than being on our road, better than having a goal.

The problem is best summarized by Robert Burns who observed that, "The purpose of life is to have a purpose." Now I have a logical reason to fear death if its purpose is to end my purpose. The afterlife suddenly became less desirable.

More ramblings like this: www.shikli.com/blog

Peter Shikli is CEO of Bizware Online Applications. You can view his bio and contact him at pshikli@bizware.com.