Mortality

Mortality. Every human being is bound by it, yet we spend all our lives trying to ignore it or avoid it. And then someday something smacks you upside the face and forces you to open your eyes. But we are good at fooling ourselves. We quickly find ways to take our minds off of our ticking clocks, ways to trick ourselves on some level to think that we are immortal. Only at the moment of our deaths are we ever truly forced to open our minds to reality. We are scared of the infinite, but we are mortified of the finite. Overall, we're all just afraid. We're always afraid. Fear drives everything. But fear is not base. Want is. It is the quintessential human base. We want, we desire, and everything stems from that. For what is fear but an emotional reaction to the possibility of loss? And we can only lose what we desire. If we didn't desire it, then we would be indifferent to its presence or absence. So desire leads to fear. Where to from there? Ignorance. We try to ignore what we fear, so that we don't have to worry about it. We hide and call it bliss. But ultimately, we all know we are afraid, and so we are edgy and rotting from within. Something is eating at us and we don't know what. We refuse to open our eyes, choosing instead to bury our heads in the sand and try and weather through it. But we are only fooling ourselves. We are rotting at our very cores, screaming inside but refusing to deal with our issues. And so we feel pain. A deep and immense pain. A pain that has come to define us. An internal struggle that we fight because we will not open our eyes and see. A struggle that has become the very nature of our lives. The Divine Comedy.

DESIRE --> FEAR --> IGNORANCE --> PAIN