Days of future past

Remember the good old days? Not the time of
your childhoood, but the real old days:
the days before you were born? Remember
a few years before that? How about 100
years before you were born? Can you
recall anything from 1000 years ago? How
about 10,000 years ago? Or five million
years ago? Or a billion? Of course not.

You can't recall because you weren't existing
in those days. You simply were not alive. Those
distant good old days were all the same as far as
you were concerned, because there was no 'you'.

Well that's exactly what the future holds for us,
all of us: nothing. It's the same experience you
don't recall from before you were born, that
condition known as 'not being alive.' Pre-birth
and post-death are alike: no living. No being. No
nothing. Nada. Bupkus. Zip. Zilch. The void.

Post-living is nothing to be afraid of because
you already experienced the same nothingness
from forever until you were born. So it's just
a return to that when you take your last breath.
Living is just an interlude.

If you live 100 years or more that's just a blip of
time compared to the time you won't be living. So
you're almost always unborn or dead, in other words,
non-existent. Normal, in a sense, is to not exist.
Forever is the time we all spend not living, except
for now, this brief time existing on the stage of life.

Interesting, isn't it, to not be in that 'forever'
condition we left and will return to. Wondrous
to be alive as human beings with self awareness,
sensual perception, emotion, memory and curiosity,
reasoning and imagination. It seems logical to
want to maximize the experience of being human
for living is so relatively brief. How do we
do that? Probably by recognizing life for the
wonder it is, by paying attention, by being in
the moment, and being open to all of it. It's all
just floating by so grab it while it's here.