The Travails
of Aging and Dying
A Blog Post
Suffering is inherent to life. It becomes even more glaring
as you start aging. As you become
older, you witness the people around you start disappearing.
You begin to hear about the death of your friends and enemies,
people you grew up with loving and quarreling. Your loved
ones start to disappear one by one. The movie actors you
admired, the singers and musicians you liked, begin to fade
into oblivion and become history. You may remember them
occasionally when you watch old movies or listen to the
music of your younger days. The world you grew up in is
already dead, and the one which replaced it does not make
much sense to you. By then, you grow up to understand human
nature so well and see the masks, hidden intentions, and
ritual behavior people habitually indulge in that you may
not like interacting with most of them or feeling comfortable
around them
Everyone in every generation experience this. Time does
not stop for you—neither does the world. You might have
run for a long time to keep pace with it and keep yourself
abreast of the changing and evolving phenomena, but at some
point, you become tired and give up fighting what cannot
be prevented. You might have tested all possibilities to
prove yourself or your self-worth or achieve something in
life to cherish those memories and feel good about yourself.
Whether you succeeded or not, compromised with your values
and beliefs to fit into the world, in the end, you will
realize that it did not deliver much of what it promised
to, and you are just another human being, vulnerable to
the same vagaries of life and Nature.
Aging reminds you
of life’s impermanence, vulnerabilities, and precarious
existence. Whether you are a billionaire or an average person,
exceptionally successful or a significant failure, Nature
will not spare you from the pain of aging, sickness, and
death. It sweeps away everything quickly to clear the space
for new life. It is the truth. We cannot fight the process
of life or aging and dying, and it is better to live with
that awareness and enjoy the blessings we can still count
on. We create our dramas between birth and death and want
everyone we know to be a part of it and enjoy it and fulfill
our need for love, security, and belongingness, knowing
well that in the end, all that is in vain; each is to his
own, and life has no meaningful purpose other than what
we assume it to be.
Yet, despite the suffering and the gloom, every life
is worth living and a precious opportunity to experience
the beauty and the mystery of the universe and be a part
of it. Imagine the odds of you taking birth in this world
as a self-aware, intelligent being and going through all
the drama that unfolds before you and the love, hate, happiness,
sorrow, honor, dishonor, friendship, and enmity that you
experience until your last breath. Maybe, it is what life
is for, to let Nature distill all our experiences and store
them somewhere for evaluation and further improvement.