Tables & Chairs, Life & Death

Life.

I only recently discovered, following the unprecedented demise of my beloved grandmother, the stark difference between verbs and nouns i.e. the former are time-bound while the latter timeless. While verbs such as running, runs, ran etc. are in some tense or another, nouns such as table and chair are simply timeless…with the exception of one noun: life. 

Unlike table and chair, life isn’t eternal. Unlike table and chair, life has a finite (more finite than we allow ourselves to imagine) period and an imminent end.

And, if our expensive tables and chairs, the “timeless” nouns, fail to live as long as the furniture store’s salesman projected, it amazes me how lightly we take “life”; constantly deepening our belief in the illusion of an everlasting life while infact it is but a sojourn.

Experiencing the death of a loved one for the first time in my life, I thought my perception on life, but first on the unadulterated reality of death will drastically change. I thought that from that day onwards, I’d live life driven by the consciousness of it being transient and ephemeral and be wary of the impending death.

Yet here I am 6 months later exactly the same as I was, or maybe even worse, before the incident. How fleeting the fear of our forthcoming death is even when it does strike us.

I guess we should start taking our tables and chairs, and their limited life span, more seriously. Perhaps then we might develop a conscious for life and death.

Finite

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