They say the opposite of living is being dead. The world seems to treat this as a binary system—you are either alive or you are dead. But I wonder if that’s truly the case. What exactly is living? Can we say for certain that being alive is the same as living? And that dying is merely the act of ceasing to breathe?
I can’t help but disagree. Breathing, blinking, defecating—these might qualify as being alive, but living, I wager, is the highest function of existence. A purpose, where simply being alive finds its ultimate meaning—a meaning positioned at the farthest extreme of this state. Anything less than that, I wager, is death. Yes! Death. I stress upon that.
Most people around us are already dead. It’s just that their death manifests in different ways, depending on how they choose to go about it. Some embrace it fully, tying a noose around their necks or jumping off a cliff. Others cling to the fragile threads of hope that keep them from going to that extreme. Clinging to the belief that the future will weave something for them, knitting them a life worth wearing—a cloak of honor, a destiny worth claiming.
But isn’t choosing not to live a form of suicide too? Death doesn’t necessarily mean ceasing to breathe. More often, it means choosing not to live as you want to. Killing the desires you hold too dear to your heart. That, too, is suicide. You can spot these kinds of dead souls around you. Their eyes don’t twinkle, their frowns never fade, their spark is long extinguished. Their death manifests in bitterness and monotony—a monotonous existence with roots tangled deep in the abyss of hopelessness.
Such people exist in a limbo. They cannot bring themselves to kill the desires they once had (or still hold close), yet they cannot act upon them either. So, they make themselves scarce. They hide from the eyes of others, afraid that others might see what they themselves witness everyday staring back at them in the mirror. Afraid of being reminded of the dire consequences of their inaction.
Only a few courageous souls take life by the throat and steer it where they want it to go. These are the living. The rest of us? We are just walking bodies, mere husks, spending time as empty vessels—walking corpses.
Who is to answer for this wastefulness? The odds of being born are 1 in 400 trillion—and yet, we live each day as corpses riding the treadmill of life. What good is this rare occurrence if we waste it so effortlessly? We tolerate this existence under the illusion that we still have time. That the life we truly desire is still within reach. “Tomorrow always comes,” right? Wrong.
The only certainty after birth is death. And we don’t know when it will come knocking. Yet, we move through life, arrogantly certain of our existence while treating death as a distant probability. We put off what we truly want, postponing our dreams until, one day, we realize—it is too late.
All of us are murderers.
MURDERERS!!!
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