Our society defines and measures life in terms of bodies. A birth marks the beginning. A death marks the ending. And everything in between is called life. In many ways, this is a flawed mode of perception, a bit like defining what you are, from the perspective of your shoes or your coat, if you ask me.
Consider the following paradox. The aforementioned physical body does not always cease to be immediately in the moment that life does. Instead, it slowly stops working and runs down, but, as science has proven, machines can take over the functions of that physical being, such as breathing and heartbeat. While we call the inflation and deflation of lungs the prolonging of 'life', it is not really enough by anyone's definition. The running down/decaying process too can be halted by artificial means. But, although that spark of life does occasionally and miraculously return, it remains the wildcard of the arrangement. It cannot always be dictated to. What life really is, remains invisible. It is the symptoms of life that we mistake for life itself.
Which brings me to the next thought. Physicality is a side effect of life. It's not the other way around, even though everything in our society and around us tries to shove it down our throats. Life comes (invisibly) before bodies. Life continues (invisibly) after bodies. Perhaps in many of its purer expressions, life exists entirely independently of bodies. Close your eyes for a moment and imagine you are flying, as far and as fast as you want to. Now, open your eyes and behold the dense imprisonment surrounding your body with limitations. My point? Why bodies? Or rather, why bodies with such limited features?
So, let's throw away the concept of bodies as yardstick and begin again...
Years ago, when a friend of mine was going through his divorce, I made the statement that perhaps, within a "lifetime" we go through thousands of lives and deaths, as we constantly change who and what we are. In his response, he compared those past "lives" to snake skins, still retaining our shape, but no longer filled with our essence. Like beads, we string along millions of lives held together by the frail, false continuity of our physical identity. And when that physical identity ceases? Do we run out of beads, just because we run out of string?
Like I said before, what if no life was more than a thousand breaths.... but at the same time we had access to an infinite number (and "infinite number" is in itself a paradox and a contradiction) of lives.
An infinite number of new beginnings...
A thousand breaths...
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