Body relativity.
Ruminations on the Ephemeral nature of life in a human body
I was walking home yesterday, from a meeting that was at once fairly emotional - the emotions of which I am yet to fully process - sometimes feeling like it was emotions of happiness, sometimes feeling like of abandonment.
It was then that I happened to see something that normally would have me going ugh and send up a silent prayer, but given the emotional state I was in, I also ended up ruminating more on what it was - and in a sense, how it was for everybody.
If you are the easily squeamish type, this might be a good time to take a deep breath - and well, maybe stop reading, maybe not, I don't know. Either way, consider yourself notified.
So, onto the story. What happened when I was walking was that I noticed there was something on the ground - took a quick step back and moved on. Normally I would have also skeedaddled to the other side of the road at mere sight - but this time I didn't quite get there.
It was the outer shell of a rat - possibly taken down by a dog and a truck combined. What interested me wasn't the rat but the fact that all of us can be squeegee-d, compressed and laid down like a thin layer of clothes - and most of what we consider ourselves - our body can be deposed just like that.
In the mixed emotions of abandonment or acknowledgement or whatever I was feeling, I recollected how it is, once you send someone's mortal remains to the crematorium, and what we get back.
After 30 - 45 minutes you are given back a pot which contains ashes and bones - with the warning of its temperature and also a warning to "do not touch the bones as there is chance of infection".
Essentially our bodies are reduced to the precursor of what becomes manure or Petroleum - a few years or a few hundreds of years later.
But the soul would have long left the body, naturally and what was "one life" would have passed. Ergo, the passing thing that we call life in this instance is but a short experience in a human body. It could start and end - but our soul - that is we, move on. The incidental experience of being inside the human body is just that - what we have learnt gained or not, everything of that experience is mostly ephemeral.
On that ephemeral note, have a good one
PS:
(Aside: Why does "ruminating" sound so much more fun and interesting than "thinking" - is it because it is less common, or is it because, the sounds we make when we say ruminating appeals more to us?)
