Transformation

"MIDLIFE crisis" is how I describe it, just as how I first read the term while leafing through the pages of a Reader's Digest issue eons ago. But I really don't know what crisis I am into right now, or is it really a crisis in the first place. All am sure is that I'm at the "ripe" age for a so-called male midlife crisis.
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It only became all too clear to me when an Inquirer article about this "crisis" popped up a couple of weeks back that somehow describes what has been bothering me. The article explained that thinking about death, or wondering about the nature of death is one of the listed "symptoms" that herald the beginning of midlife transformation.

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Uh, okay. So, I am in the middle of midlife transformation! I thought I was just naturally curious about death or nature of death and not in any way excessively pondering about it. But I realized that my mind might indeed be hosting an excess of "death kinks" when, in one evening, news about the passing of a relative brought an avalanche of thoughts thundering violently in my head, and as my heart pounded strong as if nanoseconds were days, I calmly tried to catch some air and could only loudly ask, albeit on cold feet: When?
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I knew death is about when. Who was it who said that as soon as a child is born, he/she is old enough to die. Indeed, as we, the living are old enough to die, to hear or read the phrase "untimely death" kind of ring a moronic bell to us who regard death to be as "timely" as birth itself, or as random an event as random does.
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In "Unweaving the Rainbow", Richard Dawkins wrote: We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born... Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively outnumbers the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.
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Death is a certainty. What we're so unsure, and thus, scared of is the afterlife -- if there really is an afterflife. Who knows? And what's it going to be like? Well, who'd not get apprehensive of the unknown?
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The life part of the word "afterlife" connotes consciousness. What form would (human) consciousness assume in the afterlife, if there indeed is an afterlife? No one knows. But believers will always have answer(s) to that question, as they always do with regard to anything that pertains to the dogma they subscribe to.
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Both the religious faithful and the non-believers can not claim to know the unknown. What believers assert is their unwavering conviction based on the doctrine (and indoctrination) of their faith. For non-believers, a simple admission of ignorance captures it all -- the unknown is simply unknown to begin with.
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What is known scientifically, however, is the fact that we are all matter. Since a principle of thermodynamics asserts that matter can't be created nor destroyed, and from what I gathered in the net, WIKI when we die, we will definitely merge with the universe. Einstein's equation says that matter is energy and matter does not get destroyed. Instead, matter and energy flux from one form to the other in a never-ending cycle as it merges with the universe. The biblical "ashes to ashes" seems to be a sensible, though remote, analogy to the scientific E=MC2. Dust-to-dust "transformation" or recycling is it.

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Hear it from scientists: "When we drink water, there's a good chance that we are drinking the same atoms that made up the water that Einstein may have drank, or even atoms from Einstein himself.”
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If in the 'afterlife' we are transformed to the form of molecules in a wave of energy as what the laws of physics dictates and as such assume a "form of consciousness," then who am I, or who are we, in life and even moreso in death, to breach or go against these laws?
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Consciously or not, I certainly remember the long departed loved ones, and friends and relatives who recently passed away whenever I held a bottle of mineral water, or when I get bottled up in the daily traffic of movements and inertia.
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And it's okay, if sooner or later, you'd forget to think that there could be the transformed me, or a few of my gazillion molecules, in your cup of coffee -- as you might happen to be drinking a cup of me.


[http://www.youtube.com/watch?NR=1&feature=endscreen&v=5Jf-uQQnEyw&noredirect=1]