Now

So I'm feeling really very frustrated as I have an imminent deadline for an essay, which ashamedly I have not started (and what's more, I have a second deadline on the selfsame day, for another paper that I haven't started either ... the dreaded day is January 31st - a party will follow!) The cause of my frustration is that I have to set my own title and the subject matter is 'death'. No wonder I don't feel so cheery. I just don't know where to start - I'm dead stuck... (rubbish gaff that my mum cracked earlier!)

A few of the questions that have been racing around my head: Everyone dies, so why do we fear death? What is it that we fear - pain or non-existence - or the worry of an afterlife and its essence? Is there a right time to die? When people are feeling suicidal, do they want to terminate their very existence, or do they just want to be free from the circumstances that life has dealt them? Should we prolong life for as long as possible or go to meet death?

I'm getting into an existential pickle (imagine if they sold that in jars). Last night, overwhelmed by the certainty - and yet uncertainty - of death, I lay in bed and listened to a sermon on Ecclesiastes and then this morning, I read it for myself. Life is a vapour. It passes us by. Everything good, or bad, comes to an end. So we need to embrace the moment and find God in it. To know His peace. I have been feeling less alive over the last few days whilst writing my papers in solitude. It's been an isolated dull(ish) succession of hours, punctuated only by food - how I love it! - and I have craved company other than my computer screen. I am a social animal. Ecclesiastes assured me that I was (or am, I should probably say) alive and that I should tune my head into NOW'fm rather than wishing away the present. So I did and the result, was this poem:

Now is the moment that I live for

Yesterday is a dream

Tomorrow is a possibility

A stream trickling past me into an amass of sea

I dip in my toe

Asserting the Now with a little splash

Undoes the shackles of regret

Unweights the worries in my chest

Alive in the stillness; this non-event

Torrents howl and fall

You're here, not vapour.

And on that note, I should probably proceed with my essay. There's no time like the present eh?