Continuity

“Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.”

— Horace Mann

While enduring the adversities of daily life and reading the constant media onslaught of horrid worldly events, I often find the above quote resurfacing on my mind from time to time. Perhaps an inane paranoia (especially for my age), but pondering the uncertainties of eventual death many times seeps its way into my conscious. Whether it’s becoming stricken with a fatal disease, being seriously injured in a freak accident, or even just eventually passing from natural causes like old age—a catch of being sentient is perceiving and accepting your eventual death. For me, though, being “not alive” isn’t necessarily the scary part. We were all at one point nothing more than a single cell, unaware, our only purpose to replicate into a second cell, then four cells, eight, sixteen, and so on. To me at least, it seems death is similar in a sense: pure nothingness, unconsciousness, with no perception of time or what is and what isn’t. My greatest fear isn’t the banality of what’s most probably liken to an endless nap, though. My dread, instead, lies in leaving this world without having in one way or another used my life to benefit mankind as a whole—without having won some victory for humanity.