Everything is Relationships

Writers as much as anyone else (perhaps even more so) want to live forever. They write because they can't not write, just as any normally wired human being cannot stop eating or breathing. A writer believes as long as his words remain, some tangible aspect of his being remains. Painters and musicians and artists of all persuasions would probably agree.

The entire object of a life is to persist after death.[1] There are other ways in which we do this besides creative expression. The most common ones are children (DNA) and religious beliefs (the soul) in which we persist eternally in a state of pleasure or punishment.

I am increasingly pricked by questions of my own mortality. I think often about those I care about and have cared about, of those that will precede me in death and those that will follow, those that no longer think of me though I think of them, and those that do and that I've forgotten.

We keep things that others have touched when the others meant something special to us. It's a very old practice and shares a psychological kinship with animism. Whether we acknowledge it or not, we think the item carries with it some part of the nature of the person that touched it.

That could be a football jersey, a signed book, a perfumed letter, a pillow that smells like your child, a baby blanket, a shred of giftwrap from an office party, a sticky note, a coffee cup, etc. The more intimate the item, the more powerful the connection. A football jersey has the sweat of the player. A cup once touched someone's lips (like the Holy Grail).

This connection between a thing and the person that touched it seems to be accepted universally. It no doubt had and may still have some evolutionary benefit, perhaps one that assists in the cohesion of larger communities when a key personality no longer exists or the community is too big for everyone to know and touch the personality.

There are other things that outlast us:

• It is said that all of us with each breath take in at least one molecule of air exhaled by Julius Caesar. The air we exhale is inhaled by others, and so one.
• Each time we touch another person, we exchange electrons.
• Each time we catch a cold, we are sharing not only viral DNA thousands or millions of years old, but the encapsulating host cells sneezed out in our vicinity or left on a doorknob or a piece of paper, etc
• The compression waves of our voices become undetectable by the human ear but continue to move molecules long after they can be heard, and they are still there until they become indistinguishable from the natural jostling of molecules due to ambient energy. The heat signatures of our bodies are the same.
• We leave our DNA everywhere we go, and when we decompose, everything that is in us becomes part of something else, just as everything we drink and eat comes only at the death of something else, actually a lot of something elses, from bacteria to insects to plants to animals.

We are all connected, and the connections persist after we are gone, because connections are relationships between physical things, not the things themselves; they are the laws and happenstances that relate things to each other, from traditional relationships like family and friends, to chemical ones like digestion, to mathematical ones like gravity.

"No man is an island" might just as well be said "No man exists apart from his relationship to something else."

We know this instinctively and it's expressed in aphorisms like that above or in popular culture.

In It's a Wonderful Life, Clarence tells George, "Strange, isn't it? Each man's life touches so many other lives. When he isn't around he leaves an awful hole, doesn't he?" Scrooge watches others celebrate his death. Dorothy gets to see the deeper qualities of farmhands Hunk, Zeke, and Hickory in Oz.

The list is infinite because you can't describe any human experience without a reference to something else; everything is fixed in some medium, whether it's film or paint or words or memories.

Whether or not that has meaning is a matter of individual predilection and insight.

And if you have a religious faith as I do, we do live on in a different way, but in a way that may be, just perhaps, a combination of all of these.


[1]
Which seems rather pointless if all there is to being is to continue being.