The First Casualty

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I was talking with a friend yesterday about an article he is writing with another colleague that focuses on the impact of Titanic: The Artifact Exhibition that was here at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Science over the winter. Some of the ideas they are examining put a sharper point on some thoughts on mortality that have been bouncing around in my head over the last year. Well, maybe longer, but the last six months have added to the sharpening. Among the "sharpeners" was, of course, my second stem cell transplant, and a colleague's first run through that procedure. Then my wife, Christine, walked away from an accident that could well have been fatal. All that, added to my father's 100th birthday, about which you have already heard, lured me into further musing about mortality, and im-, and how those notions fit into a harmonic view of life.

The primary realization is that the first casualty of any traumatic event - whether it threatens us, those close to us, or strangers in an event that somehow becomes personal - is our own sense of immortality.

Watch the Winter X-Games. Check it out on YouTube if you haven't seen them. It should come as no surprise that most of the top performers are children. OK, we're not talking toddlers, but we are talking teenagers with the "aging icons" topping out in their mid to upper twenties.  Look at what they do. No one in their right mind does that kind of stuff.  But actually, it is not a question of a "right mind." It is a question of a "different mind," a mind in which they are still immortal. Other people get injured, other people die. Not them. They walk with the gods - until they don't. In our sports fixated popular culture we have all heard the somber commentator note: "He [or she] is certainly 100% physically, but how are they mentally? Have they been able to forget that terrible day when, well, let's just watch the tape." And we watch some horrific moment in a "game" when a human body bends or bounces in ways never intended.

When that body is our own and it suffers insult, physical or biological, we are forced to consider that there is not necessarily always another tomorrow. Hopefully our body returns to reasonable competence, but our notion of immortality may well be forever gone. And that is not necessarily a bad thing - harmonically speaking.

"Slacker," Google's Ngram tells us, is a word that has become increasingly popular over the last decade. The Urban Dictionary defines it thus: "Someone who puts off doing things to the last minute, and when the last minutes comes, decides it wasn't all that important anyways and forgets about it." Slacker is used most often to describe young people - age-mates of the X-Games participants. That should not surprise us. Like flinging yourself into the air over a sheet of ice on concrete, the slacker's laissez-faire approach to life demands the assumption of endless tomorrows: Should something meaningful actually happen to come along, there will always be a tomorrow in which to engage it.

Once some trauma disabuses us of the notion of immortality in this life, the inclination to "put it off until tomorrow" goes into a deep spiral. The preciousness of the moment takes on new meaning. I find myself editing "truths" both trivial and significant. "Today is the first day of the rest of your life" becomes "Today could be the rest of your life." Not a shift of many words, but certainly a shift in focus.

I find that the most significant change resulting from my own loss of presumed immortality in this life has been a steep decline in my attention to external authority.  What is "expected" of me by others becomes far less important than the transcendent quartet of foster harmony, enable beauty, distill complexity and oppose harm that we talked about a few posts ago. Interestingly, that shift seems - in my mind anyhow - to have resulted in me being a better teacher, writer, artist, husband, father and friend.  Less traditional in many ways, which often confuses those I contact in those various guises - but in the long run, better - more honest.

For those of you paying close attention, let me briefly touch on the textual shift from "immortality" to "immortality in this life." Yes, the difference is intentional. And yes, my strange blend of physics and metaphysics demands an existence that transcends our current existence. It is a matter not of an afterlife as depicted in many traditional faiths - a land of hedonistic indulgence or a recreation of the family Thanksgiving dinner we always wanted, but never quite managed to pull off. My conception, rather, is a continuation of life demanded by supersymmetry and the inherent nature of the universe. Immortality - OK, yes, but you're still never going to see me attempting a fakie ollie at the Winter X-Games.

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