When I look back over my personal history and that of my relatives, I sometimes wonder if most of my existence was on borrowed time.
We live in an era of immunizations, antibiotics, and radical, life-saving procedures.
At 7, I was very sickly, one illness after another.
At 5, I had a bad staph infection.
A relative was born prematurely: would s/he have survived in a different age?
My mother was very ill after the birth of a sibling: without antibiotics she might have died. My siblings and I might never have been born. Should I even be here?
We spend so much time and effort manipulating the natural world, the natural order of things to preserve life. Preserving life without entertaining if we ought. The cult of Fear of Mortality.
I sometimes wonder if Man had never "progressed" into our current civilization, but had remained tribal and earth centered what our beautiful blue planet would look like now?
Surely we would live shorter lives, but perhaps more connected. We wouldn't be facing total global annihilation, plastic pollution, nuclear contamination, the threat of a global food and water crisis.
Our civilization, though grand in a great many ways, seems in some ways to be very perverse and skewed in it's self awareness. Our refusal to accept our own mortality is a pathos. Our self-obsessed need for material security at the cost of the welfare of others is sickness.
Everything seems off center, like we're at some sick carnival. Am I even supposed to be here?
We live in an era of immunizations, antibiotics, and radical, life-saving procedures.
At 7, I was very sickly, one illness after another.
At 5, I had a bad staph infection.
A relative was born prematurely: would s/he have survived in a different age?
My mother was very ill after the birth of a sibling: without antibiotics she might have died. My siblings and I might never have been born. Should I even be here?
We spend so much time and effort manipulating the natural world, the natural order of things to preserve life. Preserving life without entertaining if we ought. The cult of Fear of Mortality.
I sometimes wonder if Man had never "progressed" into our current civilization, but had remained tribal and earth centered what our beautiful blue planet would look like now?
Surely we would live shorter lives, but perhaps more connected. We wouldn't be facing total global annihilation, plastic pollution, nuclear contamination, the threat of a global food and water crisis.
Our civilization, though grand in a great many ways, seems in some ways to be very perverse and skewed in it's self awareness. Our refusal to accept our own mortality is a pathos. Our self-obsessed need for material security at the cost of the welfare of others is sickness.
Everything seems off center, like we're at some sick carnival. Am I even supposed to be here?
