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Attributed to Paulo Coelho, "The Alchemist"

"Life has no opposite. The opposite of death is birth. Life is eternal." ~ Eckhart Tolle.

"Adopting... an ontological point of view, we pose the question: where do we come from? (And where are we going?) That babies come from the womb is a familiar biological fact concerning our early bodies, but it is of no help with the present question. I thus lay down my... alarming proposition: We don't really know where we (as babies) came from.

"What I call the theological worldview is the idea that the world and everything in it has meaning and reason, and in particular a good and indubitable meaning. It follows immediately that our worldly existence, since it has in itself at most a very dubious meaning, can only be means to the end of another existence...

Since we came into existence one day in this world without knowing how-so and whence, the same can happen again in the same way in another world...

Birth and death, then, are changes (with respect to existence)... living is a process that takes place in time, and... birth obviously precedes death. And that is, of course, why we naturally fear death but not our prenatal nonexistence.

Gödel views our embodied existence, in this world, as at best a confused and cloudy preparation for something more meaningful - in our postnatal nonexistence (ie., nonexistence after death in this world). "Without a next life," he writes, "the potential of each person and the preparations of this life make no sense for what would be the point of bringing forth an essence (the human being) that has so wide a range of possible (individual) developments... but is never allowed to realize one thousandth of them?

Mind, in its use, is not static but constantly developing... there is no reason why the number of mind's states should not converge to infinity in the course of its development... The greater part of learning will take place in the next world, and we could very well be born into the next world with latent memories of our experiences in this world."

~ Palle Yourgrau, [Gödel Meets Einstein: Time Travel in the Gödel Universe, p.188 - 192]

The above quotes and passages about "life" holds a revered place in my heart. It's a realization that came quite late in my life.

That something that should be known intuitively by everyone from birth has now become so deeply veiled in this age of confusion.

The sun is shining bright. The fan overhead giving me respite in the growing heat.

I'm sitting at my booth looking at people passing by, each busy attending to their chores. A few grown men are playing Pokemon Go. Some people don't grow up when they grow older. Perhaps reality is easier to deal with when we make them.

It feels good with the sun on my face. The warm breeze makes me drowsy. It reminds me of the carefree days of youth. I realized this peaceful feeling is only so because of nostalgia for a time past. Isn't it strange that being in the now always brings up the past. Maybe it's because my mind is not burdened by things which I am ignorant of then.

I've been thinking a lot about my father lately. I hardly know the man. How many people can claim to know their father?

I thought of him now. Soon I will not think of him as often. They said time is the enemy of memories but our memories are made more precious as time passes. 

He sleeps a lot now. I wondered if he dreams. In his dream, does he dream of me? I have no answers to these questions. Maybe he's dreaming of sunshine on his face and warm breeze blowing under the fan and smiling about his carefree days in his youth.

(this post is dedicated to my father, a man that I only got to know a little better late in both our lives)