Life rests on death, an ember on ashes in a cold, dark room.
Survival feels personal but is about species. Once we reproduce our bodies begin the slow process of turning off all its lights. We shut down and vacate the symbiont we call our self. Mind and body part. Ghosts linger sometimes, or manifest in the presence of some undefined kind of warmth. Beyond wisps we are gone.
Some claim we return. Perhaps the same or similar energy patterns echo through chains of flesh. No one can prove reincarnation. Truth is, no one can prove incarnation, once physics gets involved. Is matter merely energy? Does the energy we call us require a lattice on which to drape itself. Must we inhabit matter to exist?
Existential philosophy deals with big questions of being such as why, how, and who. Such questions stir meaning from random luck. Luck, itself an undefined term, cuts both ways. It is neutral, a mere expression of existence. If we see benefit we call it lucky and think it good. Bad luck is when detriment finds us. Both are stochastic focus arising from chaotic blur. Good or bad are assessments requiring an artificial scale.
Balance is maintained by conservation of energy. It can be neither created nor destroyed, only changed as to form. What is form?
Back to the philosophers.
We blink to life and see and feel, call it experience, live, then die, blink out, go dark. Darkly into darkness that seems to have birthed us. We plunge from and into eternal-seeming nothingness. Briefly we light before gutter or snuff.
Fireflies, some say. Candles in darkness. Embers on ashes in a cold, dark room.
Energy is change in a field of stasis.
Life is darkness smiling.
We are not privy to the jest.
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