I Like The Opportunity

As I sit here this morning, or more correctly this afternoon as the noon hour has long past me by, preparing to type my daily missive, I notice my left arm, or more particularly the muscles in my left arm, near vibrating from fasiculation, twitching and jumping about as the nerves try desperately to maintain contact with their partners in life, the muscles they manage. One would think I should be annoyed about fasiculations and at a very surface level I am; they are a constant reminder of what is happening to me, to my body.

On the other hand I am grateful for them, for these twitches as nerves fight madly to maintain their relationship with my muscles, their union and connection responsible for my mobility and ability. These twitches are reminders of how hard my body is fighting to keep itself functioning, how much it is working to give me the strength I need to stay alive and able to live. With neither wish nor interference on my part, my body fights to live, demanding that life be won in the battle in spite of the inevitable outcome.

I think about that a lot these days, about the inevitable connection between life and death, how there is no life without death and how death is so important in bringing about new life. I wonder how many people really ponder how much around them must die so that they may life, how the plants and animals they eat were once living things, how the mere act of walking on a grassy path can cause death to the minute creatures living there. For me to live, something must die. When I die, the molecules and atoms, shaped as they are into muscle and bone, will decay, or in my case be burnt, and once again return to the gaia that is all around us.

Life and living is a wonderful thing, an experience made all the more wonderful by our ability to understand and appreciate it. It is all the more incredible when I consider the fleeting nature of all that we are, how short our years are, how fragile our bodies are. To have even the opportunity to live defies all odds, except that life is so persistent were it not for me then there would be other life in my place. I am a wonderful experiment in existence, short in span, surrounded by a world experience, a universe that's one big experiment in life, unremitting life.

As persistent as life is, so is death. Without one you cannot have the other. If I could, would I have given up the opportunity at life to avoid the necessity of death? If I could, would I wind back the hands of time and stop my birth so that I would avoid this end? No, I think not. I have had a chance at life, a chance that is shared both by so many and yet so few. I have an opportunity, a moment in the sun, and I like it.