My thoughts have drifted over the idea of death recently. I guess it started with that whole conversation we had in Johor when Johann, Joe, Brian and I went cycling there recently. This was where we talked about how great it would be to plan our own funeral.
My Facebook status message proclaiming the same attracted a fair amount of comment, some of which was surprising.
In the couple of weeks since, there have been the deaths of a senior minister in Singapore and the very tragic suicide of Tyler Clementi to occupy my thoughts.
Then last night, after my evening plans were disrupted and I chose to stay home for some quiet time on my own rather than join Mei and some friends for a birthday celebration, I decided to put on a DVD I’d bought some years ago but had never watched: The Bucket List, starring Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman.
Maybe it was a touch predictable, but a movie starring either of these two cannot be anything but brimming with excellent acting. What more one with both of them? Nicholson’s edgy, just this side of over-the-top characterisation fit the role well and contrasted nicely with Freeman’s quieter, more understated style.
More importantly to me, the theme sat perfectly with my recent thoughts of mortality and the impermanence of life. There were a couple of stand-out moments in the movie for me, most notably these:
Is it really Egyptian?
The two questions you get asked when you reach Heaven’s Gate or wherever it is they believed you went to, that is.
“Have you found joy in your life?
Has your life brought joy to others?”
We’ve made our lives more and more complex. Our day-to-day is an amalgam of career (with its own intricate mix of goals, interaction, satisfaction, remuneration and so on), home, children, recreation, familial obligations and so on. We’ve long recognised we need to return to basics, to somehow rediscover the simple purity we had at childbirth, and to divest ourselves of the bits that bring us to the edge of stress-induced paroxysm of panic and nervous ruination.
We attach importance to so many things that really don’t matter in the greater scheme of things. Douglas Adams discussed it in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy when he described the perpetual human state of unhappiness:
“Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movement of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn’t the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.”
How succinctly and well put.
To understand these two questions on a deeper level, I guess we’ll need to examine what actually ‘joy’ is. For the purpose of brevity and because this is my blog, I shall simply think of ‘joy’ as a state of pure contentment that is divorced from external causes and influences i.e. it isn’t showing the middle finger to the driver who cut you up, or bumping into your ex when you’re out with your new, drop-dead-gorgeous, ultra-rich, uber-sexy girlfriend. Nor is it winning the lottery or that multi-million dollar account you;ve been chasing for 6 months. OK, you get the idea of what it is NOT?
So what is it?
Well, I guess it’s different for everyone, but perhaps it can be described as that feeling you get the moment every part of your being connects simultaneously and completely with every part of the universe. That point when you suddenly understand who you are, and why you’re here in the first place. And that it has nothing to do with small green pieces of paper (heck in our currency that’s only five bucks), or the idiot in the Mercedes, or your ex.
It’s that moment when everything makes sense, and you can see and feel and understand that despite suffering that may be around you, or death, or destruction, that you are indeed one with everything you can see or hear or feel or touch or smell.
So, if we were to condense our life’s purpose into two questions, I guess these two would be it.
Many have said it, sang about it, led people towards it, even preached about it - and some in the process have moved many small green pieces of paper from other people’s pockets into their own - and indeed some of my favourite lines have been in Lennon’s songs and Richard Bach’s books and so on.
But at the end of the day, or perhaps at the end of our lives, what really matters is whether we, personally, can answer ‘Yes!’ to both.
Part 2 coming up soon…
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