Never having been a religious man, I don't know how it is for them, but for us atheists, growing old gives one a sense of urgency. We know our time is playing out, that it's now or never, that we'd best buckle down and see about Getting Things Done.
I work best under a deadline. Pun intended.
Knowing that this life is but a pilgrimage through a vale of tears, that all our mortal endeavors are as dew fading on the grass, this all seems to me would make a fellow complacent in his later years. Makes him want to kick back and have a beer. Ball game's on soon. No time to mow the lawn or paint the house, so let's just fix a snack and settle in. Better times are comin'.
I don't get it. I honestly don't. How is this a better way to approach life? How is it more human to devalue human activity? For that's what all religions do. Forget about what you do here. Earthly things are trivial and corrupt, worth nothing in the divine scheme. It's eternity that counts. This holds for all religions, mind you. Even the ones that talk about reincarnation; it's the same message only strung out longer. There, what you do in this life counts, but only in context of your past and future reincarnations. You have one big, long life, with lots of iterations, but it's all justified only in terms of eternity. The Big Payoff. You've got it made only when you've left it all behind. Join with the Great Consciousness that is God and spend the rest of eternity laughing your ass off at all us poor cockroaches.
Well, I'll take Archy and Mehitabel any day of the week. Wotthehell.
What we do here does matter. What we do here is in fact the only thing that matters at all, insofar as mattering has any meaning whatsoever. Each of us should spend our time being the best us we know how to be, knowing that we have only this one throw of the dice. This is for me, as the song says, the essence of true romance. Its meaning is far more profound than any metaphysical so-called insight because this is human meaning. This is my-two-hands, dirt-under-your-feet meaning. This is meaning hard-won and shared, not meaning handed down and forever inscrutable.
The clock is ticking and ain't it a cheery sound? No it ain't, not at all. All clocks wind down. But I'll take that sound over the silence of the Spheres or the dreary drone of Om. Any time. All the time. It means we're still here and we still have things to do, meaning to create, mysteries to solve. That's a far better thing to have pressing upon one's heart than the awful, fruitless notion that we all need merely to get through this misery and wait upon Judgment Day in order to be justified.
