Armistice

Today I conveyed a message to a man who once took advantage of me as I was very naive and unworldly in business when I started.

I told this man, I worked for 20 years in Singapore and since he is there for cancer treatment please let me know if I can do anything in my very little and humble power to help.

I meant what I said. As although we might be enemies. Nothing can compare to death…that at least is how I see it.

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‘There is nothing in this world that has the finality of death. It is the greatest expression of The End. That is why it’s so terrifying to so many people.

Truth is many of us live in fear of death, not merely the psychical aspect when the body and mind dies, but also the spiritual as well as the material – that’s why some failed businessmen decide to end it all, they too must have experienced a crippling form of death with the demise of their enterprise.

That is understandable. Especially when one begins to invest so much of the self into the identika of their work. Soon it’s hard to tell whether it’s work is you or you are work. You’re so at one with the whole idea of work being your outer persona…and everything that you can possibly stand for or amount too as a human being in this timeline… Work just becomes you…or you become it…so when it goes down under like a torpedoed sinking ship. You go right down as well like a deadweight anchor. Your world comes to an end…Jalan Matilah! No ‘U’ turns. No collect $200 while you pass go!

Mati means mati.

However there are many forms of death besides just dying with your tongue sticking out. People who live day in and out without ever once asking themselves, ‘hey where’s all this leading too? This waking up really early, rushing to work, putting in nine or ten hours a day, making time for yoga by learning how to eat chicken rice on the go from a styrofoam box. Where’s it all going man?’

When we have all ceased to have either the inclination or interest to ask further of these questions. Or choose to remain so bovine on account that someone else will always supply a better answer than us….about the whole business of who we really are along with where we are heading – that too I imagine has to be a form of death as well.

Did you know the Ma’ai who are a wandering tribe in Sudan have ten gradations of death…at the lowest level, you have something like the living dead, the zombie. At the highest level it takes it’s cue from KFC, original mati lah!

That’s why the whole idea of death is so terrifying to so many people. It just conjures up the dreaded image of a massive power cut just thirty seconds into shampooing your hair with sting my eye till they hurt like shit hair wash brand.

But when one begins to see death along side it’s close cousin, life as two constellations revolving around the sun of the sum of all things and how they’re usually arranged in this universe.

Suddenly we see that life and death is really just one of the same reality like a wheel turning round and round…the only possible reason why we have chosen to delineate one point called life and another death is because that is like an acquired taste of how we see the world and regularly make sense of things.

However when we begin to be deeply and internally presuaded, this cycle of life followed by death and so on and so forth just represents the natural order of things…..like how one season bows out only for another to come in…the jungle razes itself to a cinder only for life to grow furiously back again in the wake of destruction, then at the height of its bloom just when it’s all bronzed by the drought, the same cycle of death begins again and it’s repeated again and again in ad continuum…with no end…like a wheel that just keeps on turning.

Once we begin to understand that both life and death is the most natural order of things – then very slowly we will begin to lose our fear for the whole idea of death….then slowly we begin to understand how without one there cannot possibly be the other. Or how death itself is what gives depth and meaning to the whole idea of life. How one concept is so encrusted with the other that they can really only be seen as one of the same reality….one unit…a single block of monolith. As to divorce one from the other would be like examining only one side of a coin. That’s the point, when death loses it’s power to disturb, that at least is how I’ve always seen it….the subject of death, that is…it will always stand beside it’s other twin…life.’