Dying

Sidestepping the political issues, I'll just assume that life begins upon birth. That means for whatever time you spent inside your mother (hopefully the whole nine months, unless you were Athena, in which case no one knows how the hell you came to be in the first place. Oh, what's that? You popped out of your daddy's head fully armed? I see...), you were presumably "dead."

So in a way, death is nothing new to us. Been there, done that, got the T-shirt.

Now supposedly, there are people who claim to have had dreams about being born, even as they got older (I personally haven't). Plato argues that this makes perfect sense from a biological perspective; though we may not "remember" being born, it is quite plausible that we have not "forgotten" it either -- sort of like a fossil record of where we've been.

In our case, however, the endpoint of the fossil record happens to be the same as the beginning.

Which leads to a bizarre idea: the way in which we entered the world and wrinkled the dimensions of space and time from  nonexistence is, in a sense, the reverse of dying (maybe we were all given a Max Revive while loafing around inside our mothers or something. Who knows).

Granted, I didn't ask to be born. That much is true -- none of us did. But seeing as we, along with every other living thing on this planet, have already come back from the dead once, there's really no reason not to make the most of it.

It's good to be alive.

I think that will be my philosophy for 2013.