Life and Death in Midnight Reflections

With a pandemic raging worldwide, it makes sense that my thoughts stray to if death, and if it will greet me soon, or not until decades into the future. And that kind of thought would scare most people. And understandably so, such is the way of the living to fear death and the way of humans to fear what they don’t fully understand. But when I took a moment to think, without focusing on the moment of death itself, I came to a realization. For years people have debated on if there is an afterlife or not, and what the afterlife will be like. On the one hand, if there is no afterlife, then my consciousness will no longer exist to fear or even know of that fact. But on the other hand, what if there is? Something to look forward to, and a motivation to live a good, fulfilling life now. And I’ve been told for years that in Heaven, everyone is happy for all eternity, the end. But I think that there is a little more to it than that. The human mind, its consciousness, is always reflecting, learning, and changing. It’s like a river, always moving, shifting, finding new paths. I see no reason why that wouldn’t continue in whatever afterlife is waiting for us. People seem to treat the concept of afterlife as something fundamentally different in nature to what we think of as life. A “now” and a “someday”. But I think that it is just the next stage in existence. I think we’ll be able to look back at what we are experiencing now as a sort of a childhood and think “Wow, I was so ignorant then. There was so much I didn’t know. I’ve learned so much that I wish I could teach younger me. But you know what, I lived, I learned, I grew, and I wouldn’t change a thing”. And there is something comforting in the fact that someday, we’ll look back at our lives as we currently know them with the same sort of fond nostalgia as we do right now with memories of simple, happy times long ago.