ONE OF THESE DAYS WE ALL HAVE TO GO

This little sentence woke me up this morning.
I rushed to my IPad before forgetting it.
I even asked myself: Go where?

Why say that it will be a beautiful day, when it will announce the day of my death. DEATH, oh the big word! And yet since the days of my BEPC ( a high school degree), I got used to this idea after reading the Stoics.

What does Stoicism say about death?

For the Stoics, the body and soul end their journey at death. The Stoics conceive of death as a permanent return to nature. At death, the body decomposes and the soul returns to the cosmos or nature. As for the inevitability of death, the Stoics practice the principle of MEMENTO MORI, that is, ״Remember, you will die״.
It was Socrates who said that the proper practice of philosophy is 'nothing but to die and be dead' . Moreover, in the texts of the early Buddhists the most prominent term is "maranasati" which translates as
"Remember death"

Peut-être qu’après presque soixante ans après ce fameux BEPC,  cette idée commence à faire du chemin dans mon esprit.
Je vais essayer de montrer au monde qu’il n’y a pas à s’en faire et que ce moment ne doit pas être douloureux.

J’ai lu quelque part un passage assez intéressant qui dit que la mort n ´est pas la fin de tout puisqu’il y a le souvenir, que celui ci est la plus formidable de toutes les forces spirituelles. J’ai cru comprendre qu’il y a un jeu entre le temps et la vie. Il repose tout entier sur un mystère effrayant: quand il n’y aura plus rien, il y aura et quelque chose et la mort elle- même n’efface pas le souvenir.

Maybe after almost sixty years after that famous BEPC, this idea is starting to make its way into my mind.
I will try to show the world that there is nothing to worry about and that this moment does not have to be painful.

I read somewhere an interesting passage that says that death is not the end of everything because there is the memory, that this is the most formidable of all spiritual forces. I understood that there is a game between time and life. It is all based on a frightening mystery: when there is nothing left, there will be something and death itself does not erase the memory.

I would have so much to say about memory, that it is nothing but a kind of imagination that never ends up being born from its ashes. I read a nice saying by Omar Khayyam who said that after death your sleep will be brief and you will be reborn in a breath of grass that will be trampled or in a flower that the sun will wither. The afterlife is not an unlimited wait for an eventual resurrection but an immediate reincarnation into another living being here on earth. Even if a blade of grass is rather quiet, I cannot accept this interpretation.

We must therefore deprive death of the advantage it has over us. We must deprive it of its strangeness. Let's frequent it. Let's get used to it.

 

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On his deathbed, the individual sees the people around him inviting him to leave. And this departure will be easier if he reasons that he is leaving this life knowing that his friends to whom he has devoted so much effort want him out of their way when he dies. So why stay on this earth any longer?

Is it not true that at the moment of death, we see our life unfold before our eyes in an instant. Death is not such a great loss.
The greatest loss is that which dies within us while we are living. Buddhists are taught to meditate on their death and reflect its inevitability. The Jewish saying goes that the only true death is the one that has been forgotten.

Jean d'Ormesson said a wonderful word: Where there is no death, there is no love, for death and love are the twin children of history and time. How can one not be enchanted by such wisdom? Yes, I live and will always live. And I am sad that some people complain about death, because they do not know it. The fact remains that death can be seen as the end of all our amusements, be it war or money, travel or religion, painting, music, architecture or knowledge. In reality, all of this has to do with death. Why fear it?

I refuse to think that my life is dominated by the shadow of death and I will try to push away the idea of death by the gush, by the abundance, by the accumulation of life, whereas this one is almost a process of diminishment.
What remains curious would be that I would tend to think that death is stronger than life. And afterwards? Life has to be very strong to make us forget that we are going to die.
  
Isn't silence stronger than words? That absence is stronger than presence? And then what happens? By the way, there is no life if there is no death. Khalil Gibran said long before me that life and death are one, just as the river and the sea are one, so let's live with both!

D'Ormesson adds another point: there is a rather famous definition of life: It is the set of forces that resist death. My definition would be rather the opposite: life is what dies. Life and death are so closely linked that they only make sense through each other.
The secret of life is that it merges with death and that there is no life when there is no death. Life is a song of love only because it is a song of death.

It was Saladin who warned his fellow Muslims of the ephemeral nature of human greatness, making them realize that death will reduce all the honors and riches of this world, all bodily pleasures and gratifications, all early greatness, to the shroud.
This message seems rather distressing while the comfort between friends, even if they are to die, their friendship in the good sense will be present even immortal.

Since primitive man began to think, the words of our ancestors, supported by the actions and spirit of our forefathers, have constantly left the impression that life is man's calamity, not death.
Death seems to give freedom to our souls that go away to their own home where they will not know any calamity, but being confined in a mortal body, sharing the miseries, this truth is death.

Before I finish, I might note that it is when we have nothing more to look forward to in this life that we finally begin to think about the essential and about eternity.
I am going to add a word that would be contrary to everything I have written. I will write it to relieve those of us who do not agree with me? That word is this: the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the United Nations after World War II declares that the right to life is the most fundamental value of humanity. Since death clearly violates this right, death is a crime against humanity.

And if life is a great surprise, why shouldn't death be a greater surprise? The Persian proverb will tell you that life is a dream from which death awakens us.
And finally, if you are looking for a companion, know that softness and flexibility are companions of life while hardness and rigidity are companions of death.