Member-only story
Are Deaths Chosen?
Deaths and births are but the ultimate connection
“It is said that your life flashes before your eyes just before you die. That is true, it’s called life.”
— Terry Pratchett
Time is not linear. Nor is it symmetrical. Nor is it even real.
When we are born, this life force is breathed into us, as if by magic, but energy isn’t made of magic. It’s made of work — the ability to perform, exercise, transfer, move, and so on. Life is thus itself work. And when we die, this life force leaves us, as if also by magic, but it isn’t. It’s just science.
I often wonder if our lives aren’t already played out, and we’re just en media res, in the façade of what we coined as “now.”
So now… now I am alive. But are the points of life and death ultimately the same, as if some black hole in which we have the beautiful capacity to streamline our lives in between the points that are really just one point? One destination? One fucking ball of energy in which life was breathed into us and then, out.
According to Julian Barbour, “evidence we have for time is encoded in static configurations, which we see or experience subjectively, all of them fitting together to make time seem linear.”
which we see or experience subjectively
