Taming mortality
Why fear death when we can never perceive it — Epictetus
Often, I envision a future where I reside in a community for those 55 and older, engaging in activities like playing pickleball. During the game, I am fully immersed, and everything is going well. However, once the game concludes, a gradual sense of futility regarding the activity begins to set in. The mechanics behind this transition is as follows:
After the game is over, a remembrance of my mortality sneaks. This thought brings a cognizance that life ends with death, the point at which the self is annihilated. While I will cease to exist, the party goes on. Remembering this, I feel as though I am enveloped in a cloud of meaninglessness that mortality can bestow upon daily engagements, including playing pickleball.
(Note: In the context of this discussion, ‘playing pickleball’ serves merely as an example and could be replaced with any other activity such as cooking, reading, or watching a movie.)
This vision of the future elicits an unease about the meaninglessness of activities that are occurring in the present. At its core, the reason is the dissonance between the necessity to live and the inevitability of death. This dissonance renders life’s activities seemingly futile and complicates the search for an inherent (and life-sustaining) meaning within them.
This vision of the future further intensifies the sense of existential unease about living, which also gets intertwined with the angst about the remaining days of my fleeting existence on the Earth.
The transition from engaging moments of pickleball to feelings of its futility leads me to wonder if life will follow in the same sequence of events day after day.
After each game of pickleball, when confronted with mortality, will I continue to question its meaning?
Do not misunderstand me. When I am in the midst of a pickleball game, I am completely absorbed. In those moments, there are no thoughts of mortality or the game’s futility. I strive to excel. I find myself getting frustrated with mistakes I make.
On the court, everything is as it should be. It is only afterward that the doubts begin to surface.
I also know that the malady I experience could be worse.
Currently, at least, when I play pickleball, awareness of mortality does not coincide and occupy the same mental space. Therefore, mortality does not prompt me to question the meaning of pickleball while I am engaged in it. A more troubling scenario is conceivable.
It’s possible that while playing pickleball, I become simultaneously aware of mortality, allowing both to coexist. In the midst of the game, this awareness could prompt me to question the purpose of my actions, draining all focus and pleasure from the activity.
Should that to occur, it might lead me into a depressive state, characterized by a lack of motivation to engage in any activity — a far graver situation.
The fact that, while playing pickleball, the awareness of mortality does not consume my thoughts (and remains in the background), and I experience no sense of unease, suggests a way to navigate the tension between living and dying.
The answer for appeasing the life sucking tendency of mortality (no pun intended) may lie in living in the present.
In a way, living in the present disassociates the mind away from the future, and it is in the shadows of the thought of the future where mortality lurks. Living in the present makes life forever.
To quote Ludwig Wittgenstein “Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death. If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present. Our life has no end in the way in which our visual field has no limits.”
Living in the present, thus, may be the antidote of the existential crisis born from the tension between living and dying.
Ciao.
