Dying

Hm. Mortality kept crossing my mind this weekend, particularly when I was out and about on my bike, and when I was feeling -- ironically -- full of life and energy, and feeling my body and brain returning to the states of alert and fitness that I want them to have.

Mortality means thinking about your aged relatives, and surprising yourself (again) with the intellectual certainty that they will die, probably before you. I confess that my brain tries to protect me from this reality, and that I think (at some level) that we're all going to live forever, like this, and that our happy state will not pass away. Sometimes, though, a bit of clarity seeps into my conscious mind, and I remember that they -- and I -- will die. I'm glad that that thought isn't in the forefront of my mind all the time.

Mortality also means looking at yourself, and at what you've achieved in your life, and at what you want to do. In the same way that I surprise myself by remembering that we have to die, I also get taken aback when I remember what my age is. 42. 42!? Surely not. And yet it is so. After being taken aback, I get a bit scared, and think "Fuck, I'd better crack on and start doing the important stuff that I want to do before I die...like writing those bloody novels that are doing circuits in my mind...". And I feel a tremendous sense of waste, and of urgency, and I feel galvanised into action -- there's so much to do, and so little time... But then I tend to think, "Tomorrow, I'll start that tomorrow...I've got this cooking and ironing to do, and I should go out on my bike, too, for fitness' sake."

You have to wonder, though, how many more tomorrows you might have.

There's an Ezra Pound poem I remember (ish):

And the days are not full enough
And the nights are not full enough
And life slips by like a field mouse
      Not shaking the grass

Although he was a deplorable fascist, he said it better than me.