Entry 29: Human Life: A Cycle?

Think of how nature repeats its cycles over and over again: Summer turns to winter and returns again; day follows night and returns again; the tide rises and falls and rises again. Then, think of individual human lives. Are our lives like these endlessly repeated cycles of the natural world, or is a human life different? How do you think of your own life, or the lives of people close to you? Is it any easier to think of death for you or your friends and family when you put it in the perspective of a natural cycle? Why or why not? If not, what makes it different?

• There are different levels of looking at cycles when talking about human life. On the small scale, human life is a continuous (and sometimes really boring) cycle. Here's an example: we wake up, we do our daily routine, we go to sleep, then we wake up again, we do our daily routine again, and we go to sleep again, and so on. On a scale that is a bit larger than the previous one, we can say that human life is linear instead of cyclical. When people die, they will just... die. It's their end. If we are being really scientific, we can say that there are no souls and that the physical body will just decompose back into the Earth. So it's linear. On an even larger scale compared to the previous one, human life is actually a repeating, continuous, and endless cycle (unless homo sapiens went extinct). People are born, then they live, and they give birth (some), and then they die. The cycle repeats itself again when the children who are given birth to live, and then give birth to their own children, and then they die. I believe that it may not be any easier, know that death is part of a natural cycle. But it's actually not any harder as well. I think that it's better to think that if we only have one life, we should live it to its fullest.