Memento Mori/Memento Vita

Went for a wake yesterday, my uncle recently passed away from complications from his surgery. Life is short, and death is the only certain thing in it. Thankfully he passed on when my cousins were more or less capable of supporting my auntie and themselves.

It is said that life is a game. And in more than a few ways it is. Death is the one great foe in the game of life. It makes us lose. Death is the inevitable loss that everyone will face sooner or later. Hopefully later for most people. In life we always try to win, always trying to get what we want, in dreams, career, ambition, love and etc. Yet death comes and shatters everything, making grand fools of us all. A sickening thought. It need not even reach us, but just touch someone close, and our lives can be in turmoil.

In other words, life is a game where you cannot win.

Where is the point in playing a game you cannot win? Is it not often said that only fools play a game where there is no clear chance of winning? It is in fact not rational to play a game expecting to win when evidence shows that you will most surely lose. Life is like that. We are alive, and we live like we are going to win, or have already won, but we will lose, it is inevitable. Why not just give up from the start if we have no chance of winning?

It seems wrong to do so. There is a saying, that it is better to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all. Perhaps. Perhaps we need not win in order for something to be of value.

In the unknown time between us and unknown death, we live. And perhaps we live not because we exist, but because we will die. We live like we will die, and that is what makes us alive. To exist with an end in mind. Perhaps sometimes that is all that is needed to feel alive. To know death is one, to experience death is another, but to live we must understand that death will come, and so we do everything we can to live, to defy it, to render it's victory meaningless, to make our loss irrelevant.

Remember that you will die, but also remember that you are alive. Live your life so well that even death itself will tremble to take you.