Eternity Might Not Be as Long as You Think

"The Fountain" opens soon and from the ads appears to have to do with, you guessed it, the fountain of youth, which makes you wonder when you look around; what drives this nearly obsessive quest for youth? Did you enjoy your youth? Those years where blossoming was blooming, was it fun? Some folks will admit it was a blast, others aren't quite so sure, and to many they wouldn't go back there, unless they could, you guessed it again, "didn't'cha", know what they know now! Go back to being a teenager again, only keep what you have learned through the years, hmm, has a certain appeal don't you think?

Katherine Neville, whose novel, "The Eight", is now classed by Amazon.com as "a cult classic translated into over twenty languages," brought out this quest and lust, in a sense, many years back, when in reality it wasn't as well known in the United States. Sure we knew that folks went to Miami to take a break and grab some sun in their retirement years, but that was just something that was done. We never connected in our minds that seemingly, like Lemmings, who know what the whole culture is supposed to do, that there might be something to the sun and fun that extended life? But on the darker side of that revelation comes a haunting, shadowy and not at all to be desired result, and we for certain don't want to talk about that, because sun makes skin shrivel, it is apparenlty cancer causing and when all is said and done, sand and heat don't really make you feel younger, they make you feel hotter and gritty (which is why folks coming off the beach hit those showers!).

What's the answer(?) is hard to figure when we can't even ask the right questions on this one- because ageing takes place in our life whether we like it or not. Ageing happens slowly, for certain, but in perspective switching portions of our lives, until finally at around forty-five for men, and perhaps the same age for women; we begin to "feel it." We can slow ageing down, as one popular scientist, Ray Kurzweil, has done. Ray claims, and it would seem that such is the case, that biologically he has the body of a thirty-five year old, but chronologically his body is sixty plus years (see his website on that one) Dr. Kurzweil takes a regimen of time intensive herbs and other age inhibiting ingestions, and, from all appearances, this is working for him. This has astounding implications for the rest of us, especially if, in five years, Dr. Kurzweil has only aged two biologically while turning nearly seventy! Can't speak for you, but I'd be jumping on that book of his to find out what he's doin'?

So we come to the concluding crux of our question, what drives this, is it fear? Any honest person is going to have to own up to the fact that we don't approach death as a friend, it is, a universally experienced fear. This must drive some, but it doesn't seem to be up to the state of being a prime type of drive for all folks? Is it lust? Surely some people have such an enormous "I want to experience life in it's fullness" within them, that they literally lust away from death to "living" life- they consume life and take it on with almost overbearing enthusiasm for life itself. But again, this doesn't seem to be a prime type of drive for all folks, rather this applies to some, perhaps even to you? Some people believe in destiny, that we are born, live out a life which we can have control in, but not over, and then we die. These folks quote from the "Bible" or other religious works about the destiny we all inhabit; and the end we will all reach. This sense of destiny it seems possibly underlies all the other approaches to wanting to "stay young." People live out their lives, and whether they believe it or not, they are, like a Mobius strip, encapsulated in the result; which overall we conclude, is life. Here comes the zinger, you know all stories have to end with a zinger, don't they? You wouldn't want to read something and then have it end on a fizzle instead of a sizzle, would you? Let's consider what could be an interesting experiment for all of us; what if we turned the sages of antiquity into a guide of sorts, and really considered what they had said, as the Tim McGraw song says, "live like you were dying."