What's the Plan

Often in life, we are obsessed with planning everything in detail. We plan meals, vacations, sales quotas, home redecorating, retirement, budgets, parties, dates, what car we are going to buy, what we are going to say, and what we are going to wear. There's something uniquely human about our desire to plan everything.

It occurred to me that all this desire to think about the future course of things comes to a grinding halt in one conspicuous area. Thoughts of our impending doom. We don't want to think about our bodies failing or how we might die. We spend a considerable amount of time avoiding thinking about it. We spend a furious amount of time planning for everything else that comes between now and then.

It occurred to me that if we spent just a little bit of time thinking about our own mortality when making all our other plans, we might eat healthier, exercise more, and treat our friends and family with a little more love and respect. This doesn't always happen. Many of the people in the hospital or just in poor health today ate, drank, or smoked their way into that condition without much thought about where they were headed. People take the easy path of doing what pleases them, indulging in their vices and expend as little effort exerting themselves as possible. Not everyone, but most people. The planning is all about the things they love or want to do and not about how they are going to finish their life.

But we also plan for what happens after that. It's called religion. I think many people think about religion in a negligent manner. They look at it as a country club membership. They'll pay their dues by going to church when they can and contributing what they can. They'll say they believe and try to live a pious life, when it occurs to them. They may not have any real control over what happens after they die, but they will plan and act as if they do.

Sometimes, I wonder if people are really just fooling themselves. How do they know they're signed up for the right religion and doing the right things to get into heaven? What if they die and instead of the pearly gates, Zeus spends eternity berating them for not offering enough animal sacrifices? There was a South Park episode where a bunch of people died all at once and they were being sorted out in heaven, and someone in the crowd shouts out "Who was right? What is the one true religion?" and God or St. Peter says, "The correct answer is.... Mormons." You can hear people in the crowd going "What!? No way!"

I'm not an atheist. I'm of the belief that we don't know, can't know, and won't get to know what happens after we die until we die. Anything can happen. We could simply stop existing, nothing that was us may continue at all. It's hard to imagine, hard to believe, because it seems like such an insult, but it could happen. We could get recycled, reincarnated and reborn (what if it's no guarantee that you'll be human?). We could have something else entirely happen that we don't even have a frame of reference to understand. We could have any one of the religions in the world's story be the one and only thing that happens, or we could have each person's individual belief come to pass for that person. I kind of like the idea that your own personal force of will and belief will manifest itself - makes you feel powerful to imagine that's true.

To me, we don't get to know what's on the other side of life. It's a lot like a singularity, the universe, the big bang. They call it a singularity because there's no way of knowing what happens on the other side of that point in time. Some physicists believe that the universe may be like an enormous single stroke engine. It could be continuously expanding, collapsing, and being reborn in an endless cycle. To not know something isn't necessarily a bad thing. Often it's a good starting point for knowledge. I like to listen to everyone's idea of what they think the answer to this question is. I think often they just believe what they want to believe, what gives them comfort. What gives me comfort is to keep an open mind and wait and find out when it happens to me.

And to eat well and exercise enough. I would like to plan a little for the physical demise.