Extinction

My gratitude comes from the sheer gift of Life itself.  

I have been having the experience of a terminal person, rather than of someone who only knows about death. Life has grown more vivid, now that I know the end is here. It occurred to me recently, that we humans are already experiencing an extinction event. It isn’t popular to mention this, even less desirable to suggest it is already happening. I think it is. Fair warning. That is what this Slow Lane is about. My subject is what some call “the end times,” what I call, “fulfillment.”

I am not under the thrall of some ‘New Age’ dream about transformation. I sense death and destruction in the air (literally in our atmosphere). I can see where the trends are heading, and I can feel despair and anxiety growing. I directly experience the grief in my soul. I am, at times, very ashamed to be human, cause look what we are generating.

I know as a writer — the wind has gone out of my sails. I don’t have several generations of others to write too or for. My audience is becoming dust. I don’t see a future to dream about. This awareness constantly disturbs me, upsetting the joy aging has brought me. The prospects, I see for my daughter, haunt me. I worry that my time on Earth, has somehow been tainted by this planetary suicide. For all of this, I feel immense, and on-going, grief.

I am only a man, what can I know for certain? Perhaps something surprising is going to play out. I don’t know! Humanity may have more chapters to play out.

But, dying has shed an alternative light on all of this. I am experiencing the way inevitability enhances life in unexpected ways. Take conflict, for instance, the inevitable lack of resolution, leads to a living with conflict, and no sense that it has to go somewhere. Relief lies in inevitability. There isn’t really a dominate world-view. The end insures a complete life. The clouds of expectations give way to acceptance, a quality far too scarce in our current human world.

I have, as I have been coming to the experience of dying, witnessed the way it has altered my being, making me more human, and sensitizing me to the miraculous nature of this existence. My later years have been the best — they have led me to be more fulfilled in life — than I would have ever imagined. Because I have witnessed, and know fulfillment, I can imagine that it might be in the offing toward the end.

I have been blessed, if you want to call it that, with enough time in the darkness, to know that darkness is another form of Light. It is, to be sure, the form I most fear, but it is also the experience where I have been most alive, available, malleable, and aware. The darkness, I’ve learned, is the womb of light and change.

Because I am a creature of darkness, I can think that the coming time, as opaque as it is, might lead us into a blaze of glory. A warm, friendly, inexplicable dark and massive bonfire. As we become more subject to the darkness, the better angels of our being are roused into being.

Suicide is not the end, nor is it, when it is collective.  Instead, it just might be fulfillment of a sort.