The greatest antidote to having a happy life, is the overwhelming and ever-present spectre of our mortality. I once gave some profound advice to my children, by telling them not to ask any questions - as there were no answers.What I meant was, that life is such a wonderful but bizarre experience, and yet love it as we do, the entirety of our existence is essentially and hopelessly beyond our comprehension. I have relentlessly spent much of my life looking for reasons for our existence, if only to seek comfort from the harsh reality that inevitably it must cease, and probably with no conscious recollection for all eternity.
I say 'probably' because I have become what I have coined as a hopeful Agnostic. This means that as the result of such a 'bizarre' experience as life, and it being so far from our ability to comprehend, that anything is possible, even to the existence of a supreme being - or God. In fact, if their is not a God then we are all doomed, for the alternative is too awful to contemplate.
The prospect of dying and never again to have any awareness or conscious thought, is particularly frightening. It effectively means that all we do in life is without purpose, and that all the wonderful and loving relationships we have formed are meaningless.
And so I pray each night, to a God in whom I don't really believe, in order to seek comfort and to try and make sense of what has happened to me, given that I have been dead once and must return again to I know not where.
That may be my comfort, for this life is so profound that it can be very frightening, and to not be aware is to be released from that continuing dread.
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