Humans are one of the few intelligent beings in the galaxy who haven’t quite solved the problem of death. And yet they don’t spend their whole lives screeching and howling in terror, clawing at their own bodies, or rolling around on the floor. Some humans do that – I saw them in the hospital – but those humans are considered the mad ones.
Now, consider this.
A human life is on average 80 Earth years or around 30,000 Earth days. Which means they are born, they make some friends, eat a few meals, they get married, or they don’t get married, have a child or two, or not, drink a few thousand glasses of wine, have sexual intercourse a few times, discover a lump somewhere, feel a bit of regret, wonder where all the time went, know they should have done it differently, realise they would have done it the same, and then they die. Into the great black nothing. Out of space. Out of time. The most trivial of trivial zeroes. And that’s it, the full caboodle. All confined to the same mediocre planet.
But at ground level the humans don’t appear to spend their entire lives in a catatonic state.
No. They do other things. Things like:
- washing
- listening
- gardening
- eating
- driving
- working
- yearning
- earning
- staring
- drinking
- sighing
- reading
- gaming
- sunbathing
- complaining
- jogging
- quibbling
- caring
- mingling
- fantasising
- googling
- parenting
- renovating
- loving
- dancing
- fucking
- regretting
- failing
- striving
- hoping
- sleeping
Oh, and sport.
