No Life Without Death

We take life for granted and expect it to last forever. Well, life as a whole will be there for quite a while yet, but our individual life is much shorter — a few decades if we’re lucky, and not one of them guaranteed.

There’s an asymmetry in how we meet the two ends of it. We become conscious and alive seamlessly, without effort or understanding of what is happening. By the time we have the equipment to notice being alive, we already are. But death we see coming, or we try to, and we struggle deeply with it. Our own mortality feels impossible to truly grasp. Everyone else dies; we keep expecting ourselves to be the exception.

Zoom out, and the picture shifts. Life is a continuous process that started over four billion years ago and hasn’t stopped since. Each new generation passes on what I think of as the olympic flame of life — an unbroken chain of existence stretching back to the earliest organisms on this planet. The flame is the point. Each runner carries it for a stretch and hands it on. The runner is not the flame. The flame is not the runner.

Death is essential for evolution. It allows life to grow what works and let die off what doesn’t work — not as cruelty but as editing. Without death there would be no change, no adaptation, no improvement. Death is not life’s enemy. It is life’s partner in the long dance of evolution. The two are inseparable. One without the other is a frozen image, not a process.

Life is also interconnected at every level. We are part of a complex ecosystem where species depend on each other for survival — pollinator and flower, predator and prey, microbe and gut, root and fungus. Even within our own bodies, there is constant renewal. The bacteria that outnumber our own cells are not passengers; they are part of the working machinery. We are not the discrete individuals we imagine. We are moving intersections in a web of relations that long predates us and will continue without us.

We are not separate from life — we are life, expressing itself through our particular patterns of consciousness and experience. That framing helps me with the asymmetry. While we find it difficult to accept our individual finitude, we are part of something magnificent and ongoing. Our consciousness, our thoughts, our contributions become part of the larger story of life and evolution, even when the specific runner has handed over the flame and left the track.

The flame passes on, taking new forms, exploring new possibilities. Always changing, always growing. That is a way of lasting forever which doesn’t require any of us to personally manage the trick.

This post is from an earlier moment in the walk(20/02/2022). This post is part of the preamble, about happening before SPLectrum saw the light of day.

Photo: Melissa Askew / Unsplash