The transience of life

This post was first publised on my Medium profile

A case of bad flu can often send one to a trip down the rabbit hole of “thoughts-that-have-been-regularly-pushed-back-at-the-top-of-my-overfilled-mind.” I didn’t get much work done this weekend, and while mindlessly scrolling through my phone/laptop/tv in the midst of Monday Blues, I kept thinking about young people who have departed from this world. I did not personally know any of these people that well — at best, they were just random acquaintances at university. Now, a part of me wishes that I did know them well, that I had known a bit more about their dreams, fears, aspirations in life. I’m not sure what I would have done with this information. It’s just that, the idea that people who are in their youth can so suddenly disappear from this earth, is a bit jarring on some level.

We go through so many pre-defined motions every day. We tick off boxes from our daily to-do-lists, we have grand plans about what we want to achieve 1,2,5 years from now, but the hard reality is that none of us have a guarantee on the actual time scale that we have to achieve all these things. When our reel of borrowed time finally ends, what happens to all the thoughts and plans that we had made for ourselves. Do they simply cease to exist, the output of hours of mental heavy lifting just disappearing into a non-existing ether? Or are they out there somewhere, part of the unified and invisible sub-conscious stream of thoughts, ideas, emotions and plans that is and isn’t a part of the collective human experience? Nobody knows, and perhaps nobody ever will.

Every human being has or had aspirations at some points in their lives. What happens when these aspirations aren’t realized? Further yet, are these aspirations even supposed to be realized? In our quest for wanting to change the world and leaving our mark during our brief presence in this universe, are we missing out a crucial element on how we should be living and experiencing life? I guess these questions will keep me up every night until I recover from my flu and am able to push them back to the long-term memory cache. I hope those flu medicines do their magic soon.