I am reading Sum at the moment. I’m only half way through but it has tapped into thoughts that I often have in the dark when I am alone. There is one particular thought that has enraged but reassured me.

I spend a great deal of time imagining all my worst fears coming true. I don’t know why I do it to myself, perhaps in preparation for the worst should it ever happen. I don’t know. I’ve always done it. I should stop. So one day I did manage to stop. But only by replacing this routine of fear with something else that at the time I considered to offer the prospect of a more uplifting routine of hope. This exercise was designed to make my life more positive but it didn’t end up that way. At least not in the way that I imagined. Instead of imagining everything I most feared coming to pass I began to spend that time imagining if none of it ever did happen. Ever. As a game I assumed it would be fun and little more than light relief but it turns out my worst fears coming true are nowhere near as alarming as if they didn’t. Think about it. No one you love ever dies. Life has no ebb and flow. It just flows, forever more. Even on the most basic level, how quickly would you run out of things to say to all the people you love once you’ve enjoyed the luxury of saying everything that needed to be said? Isn’t there even a slight possibility that you’d get a bit tetchy with each other after a while? Even if you really, really love them. Be honest. Surely there is the possibility that you might end up, eventually, because we are talking of living forever here, getting sick and tired of each other. I don’t believe it is possible myself, it is anathema for me to imagine feeling disinterested about the people I love, but it is very possible for me to be dispassionate about other people and think it possible for them. Something which makes it equally possible for them to imagine it about me. Might you get so sick and tired that you all come together through a kind of celestial mediator one day and decide it is time for you all to go your separate ways and say goodbye? Imagine what that would do to you. Having the knowledge from that moment on, forever more, that you got what you wanted, to be with all the people you love most forever, and came to the conclusion, after millennia, that choosing to create your own ‘false’ death by deliberately parting is where all those teary mortal promises of eternal love ultimately led. You and your loved ones all enacting a teary, but relieved, goodbye. It would be emotionally winding to have that concept of eternal love destroyed, that’s for sure. You’d find an afterlife bar and weep at the knowledge that your dream of loving ‘forever’ was pure fantasy. I think it would make you become rather cynical about everything else to do with existence. Love is the pillar on which humanity basis it’s perception of itself. Could death, then, be a kind of luxury that those who live in this eternal state ‘gift’ to those who live from now on? To protect them from experiencing the agonising knowledge that to profess to love someone forever is a well meaning lie that can never actually be tested. It may be paradoxical, but could it be death that actually allows our fantasies of loving people forever to remain true?

So, where has this exercise led? It has resulted in me having to contend with the idea that I should perhaps be thankful if one day those I most love and cherish leave me, or I leave them, because it is the very prospect of our eventual separation that bore the fruit of the ultimate love between us. An odd concept, I’m sure you’ll agree, but there you are. I wonder how many other aspects of life that we all dread are actually responsible for inspiring so much of our happiness? Fear, it seems, could actually be what protects us from the truth of life we would discover if we were not afraid.

dan@idler.co.uk

Tuesday, 22 September 2009