Death, life, illusion

I just had a thought about all the little miseries that are everywhere across the planet. Each life being lived, and each life being died. As I write this, how many countless hundreds of new lives are coming into the world, and how many are passing? Life and death is happening all the time, everywhere. Each person's existence - the sum of all their hopes and dreams and achievments and failings and wisdom and knowledge and potential and joy and love and all of it - is ended at their death. Death is such a strange thing. It comes to us all, yet we fear it, don't look at it, worry about it and so on. What is death?

I grew up to fear and hate death. What worse way can there be to have it be your slave? What is life without death?

I watched the series "Band of brothers" recently and one of the soldiers talked about his being already dead. The way he saw it, he had to just embrace death and risk, and just live as though he was already killed, then he would paradoxically stand more of a chance of surviving.

Our lives are illusions, anyway. Anything that happens to us really is just as much a matter of fate as anything else. The idea of choice really is nonsense. The choices we get are only as a result of some kind of "God given" grace. And so all achievement really is illusion, too.

Who knows how long I'll live? I don't really know. Nobody can really know.