Actually, it’s God’s list!
Tag: Dying
“I Quit!”
What if you knew when you were going to die?
What if Death Quit Her Job?
Would we rejoice?
Maybe. But what about her?
Death has had nothing but sadness in her day job. No one likes her. No one wants to see her coming. She clearly does not enjoy her work. Who would? Coming to work is depressing. “Hello, Mrs. Jones. I’m going to take your soul today.” And guess what? She has very few (no) friends.
And you thought you had a bad job.
Somewhere along the way, Death ended up collecting souls as part of the team in Heaven. Eventually she finds out why. And that’s not to say everyone goes to heaven after they die. No. That’s not it. And that’s not Death’s job, you see. She just makes the rounds according to the schedule and collects the souls so the other departments can get them to the correct eternity. You know. If you sin too much, you go to Hell. If you’ve accumulated enough brownie points, as it were, you get to spend eternity in Heaven. Everything is free there. Free health club memberships, country club passes, zoos, museums…It’s all free. It’s fun in the beginning but well. Everything gets boring after a while. Even Perfection. And free booze.
Back to Death. She definitely wins top prize for “sucky job” and to offset her terrible work life, she buys beautiful clothes. Her retail therapy outings have earned her the nickname Coco for Coco Chanel, her favorite designer. But she can wear Vera Wang, too. Betsey Johnson, Calvin Klein. It doesn’t matter as along as it’s expensive and gorgeous. But Chanel is her bestie.
When our story opens, Death quits. Yup. Finally, she’s had it up to here. The cruise ships are the absolute worst. Bodies and their attached souls float around in the ocean shivering their lips off, and Death has to handle each person. Some are still alive, and in every manner of scared to death. And then Death comes by. Imagine. Cold. Wet. Make it freezing, soaked. Almost drowning or recently drowned. (What a crappy way to go!) “It’s okay, Mr. Smith. I’m here to help you pass peacefully.” BAM. Mr. Smith bops Death in the jaw. “Oh, no you don’t!” The arguments over the years would make your hair hurt. Seriously. Death has heard them all. But now, she’s decided to quit.
And it’s not pretty. You can read all about it in my book, Deathlist, coming to a bookstore near you. There’s a lot more to it than Coco Chanel and Death, however. I’d hang on to your bucket seats. It’s quite a ride. Funny. Philosophical. Profane. Good and evil. Life’s purpose. High concept stuff wrapped around a book in which God plays too much golf, and the Holy Spirit is almost as much a clothes horse as Death. And there are epic battles afoot, Stay tuned for more posts about this crazy novel. Until then, I’m thinking we want Death to keep her job. Just sayin’.
Productive Waiting
“… getting to San Diego from Los Angeles on surface streets would take eight days.”
ROBOTS and AI
ROBOTS & ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Elon Musk thinks people everywhere should be frightened of AI.
Bill Gates told Charlie Rose that AI was potentially more dangerous than a nuclear catastrophe.
Even the recently deceased Stephen Hawking said, “I think the development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.”
What do you think? Here’s what I don’t like. I don’t like that the first few volleys of conversation in the chat room are AI. Maybe from a robot. I don’t know!
“How can I help you today?”
“I’m sorry you’re having that problem.”
“Let me see if we can find someone to get you an answer.”
“Could you describe the situation in more detail so we can route you to the right person?”
In fact, as I type this, my AI helper here inside my computer is fixing my spelling, anticipating my words, and adding and subtracting commas.
My AI person is cute, but he’s kind of a badass, don’t you think? He’s shooting me a dirty look because he’s not pleased that he’s been discovered. Ungrateful little wretch. And here I’m giving him the limelight, too. It’s so hard to get good help.
I get it. AI buys big companies some time on the phone. And it might save them money.
AI might also make it so you’re not needed anymore.
That’s okay. If you’re lucky you can go flip burgers. Wait. They have AI-assisted robots that are flipping burgers. Well, maybe you can pick fruit. Nope. They have AI-assisted robots that are picking the fruit. Ahem. Make that the ripe fruit, as AI bots can figure that out, too. Wait. Is AI bot redundant? No. And it’s not even new. I just saw a post: “AI bots are getting more dates than you.” It’s simply wonderful that technology has made finding a soul mate easier. The good news: We have lots of choices these days. The bad news: They might not be human.
I do feel that my AI bot in my computer here is great eye candy, but I have to say that I agree with Elon, Bill, and Stephen. We’d better be careful. The sci-fi dystopias where the machines take over, the computers outthink our best thinkers, and the fruits pick themselves may not be science fiction at all. Someone needs to have their finger on the “Hold-On-Just-A-Minute-There-Pardner” button. Let’s hope that person is someone on our side and not a robot in human skin.
Temporary
We just dropped off our twenty-year-old son at the airport. He is so, well, twenty. After raising two boys to manhood, I know that Kahlil Gibran was probably right: Our children are only on loan to us.
I had heard it, but I didn’t have a clue of what that meant. When they were little, I fooled myself into thinking they were mine. But now I’m not so sure they ever were. Yes, they pretty much did what they were told—most of the time— because they didn’t know any better. However, those times didn’t last. And the boys often made their own decisions and mistakes, because that’s how they grew up. Childhood is temporary, as are many other things. The speed of our children’s progression to adulthood from the womb makes my head spin. Why is this?
If our children are on loan and temporary, then so are marriage (‘til death or divorce do us part), our age, our highs, and lows. The seasons come and go. Winter fades to spring, which yields to summer and on to fall. There is no constancy in life except the fluidity of movement of one moment to the next. There is never a time when everything comes to a screeching halt. Never. The idea of it is so unfathomable to humankind, that most religions have an afterlife. Good or bad, heaven or hell, it’s a continuation of now into the future. We are almost never here and now, because now is like a freight train with “then” before it and “someday” after it, and “here” lasts only until that freight train leaves the station.
That means that there is no real past when you’re in the present. We cannot retrieve our children as they once were. We cannot ever again feel them inside our bodies, in our arms, or on our backs. That was temporary—a phase that is no more. I am convinced of the temporary nature of the past. Why, then, can I not see that the future is a fleeting, unattainable bundle? How insane am I that I do not see this? We project forward as if there were a way to control the future. There is none. We prepare for the future, we save, we worry; we think we can control outcomes, but alas, the future has no bearing on the present. It will be what it will be. That does not mean we don’t try to achieve our goals. No, rather, it means we try to plan our lives so that we must live only in the present knowing that any other form of living must negate the thing of life itself. It is so rudimentary but almost impossible: many people spend more time outside of now than in, and it is no wonder that the passage of time blurs on its way through life’s train station.
If there is no “present thread” (maybe because it is invisible) holding this day together, then it pulls apart, like a sweater unraveling, and the fabric we think we’re wearing is naught but a tangle of yarn on our mind’s floor.
Because life is temporary, my kids are on loan, my mom, brother, and spouse are fleeting, and everything is but a smearing of consciousness. I must stop. I should grab the hands on the life’s clock, hold onto them like the devil, and slow them way down as if my life depended on it. Why? Because it does. It just does.
Kathryn Atkins 2006
FINISH IT!
You: “Who me? Are you talking to me?”
Your conscience: “YES. You. You have started a lot of things. Let’s finish one.”
You: “How?”
Your conscience: “I am SO glad you asked. Take a moment and write down all the reasons you can’t finish. If you need help, I have a short source for you to check out”:
You: “Wait. That’s not me in the photo!”
Your conscience: “It could be. It’s time to finish your thing — whatever it is before, well, you know.”
You: “That’s not fair! I’m busy.”
Your conscience: “Look through this PDF. We think you will find a few pages that can help you see what you’re afraid of, and how to fix it!”
Deadlines
Deadlines are the lines drawn in the sand, the air, and on calendars. They are imaginary lines past which one should not go, or you’ll die. Die of what? Failure? Disappointment? Losing a job? Not answering a need? Shame?
Deadlines are a form of communication. “I need this by noon so we can move forward on the project.”
There should be no room for negotiation in a deadline. There is no room for negotiation in death, is there? So why do people push up against deadlines by crushing the work to be done up against the wall of the deadline? To see if it will move? Will it give in like a loose door, or an unsure mother or father? Kids know this instinctively. Will the rules change if we keep ignoring them? Will Mom and Dad change their minds? Will my manager forget? Will the rule/deadline go away in the rush of life?
Some of us use faraway deadlines like beacons for purposeful activity, plotting steps from A to B in the final goal to arrive at Point Z. Others of us assume that there’s still plenty of time and that there’s no use getting all excited — nothing can be gained by starting too early, they say. It wastes time to start too soon, they say. Besides, working under the pressure of a close deadline works in in their favor, they think, as in, “I work better because I’m more focused if time is short.”
Oh? What if your computer breaks? What if the electricity goes out? What if you get sick? What if?
I like deadlines. I like setting up a meeting… it gives me a deadline. I like to be early, to have room and time to make one last pass, one final reading, a once over to see if I left a sponge in the abdomen of my patient before they wake up. (I wanted to see if you were paying attention!)
There’s the Leonard Bernstein quote to throw in here, too. “To achieve great things two things are needed: a plan and not quite enough time.” I think that’s the reason deadlines are SO important. Somewhere along the creative lines of life, the concept of not quite enough time leads us to finality. If we didn’t have deadlines, we would continue to fix, trim, and self-edit until nothing ever, ever was produced. “Perfect is the enemy of good,” as they say. Someone has to say those three wonderful words, “It is done!” (“Not I love you,” which are another three wonderful words.)
I like the pressure and excitement of a looming deadline, but sometimes, just sometimes, I procrastinate… to feel that teeny rush. Shucks. My cover is blown.
I write about the things that I would like to do better. Largely because I’m not perfect. Until I am, then, I’ll remain ever faithful to setting deadlines, and hopefully keeping them, unless the other deadline… the big one, like in a database somewhere with my name on a date… keeps me from my deadline here in this plane.
E Is for Eternity
Eternity — it was the last thing I thought about when I died. I was supposedly going someplace (as they say) for a long time. In fact, they say the place you go will be the place you stay for the rest of time. I cannot fathom this any more than many people can fathom living with the same person for all one’s lifetime. But the fathomability of all things varies with each person’s fathom factor, which may change as one ages, or may be one of those things stapled onto your DNA as much as your eye color or your baldness factor. I would like to think we have seasons of fathomability.
Spring sees growth in everything. Change is the order of the day; newness rules: buds, leaves grass, trees, chick, puppies, bunnies, all that stuff. Everything is new and feels good; anticipation sprays the air with an aroma of future, excitement, lust and baseball, for those that like the sport, which I don’t. But I do know spring. I like spring. It hits me in different ways all the time. I crave that edge, that indefinable “What’s next?” that pushes me to know it’s time to energize my creativity and push forward to the next thing. God will steer me as he has always done. Spring rocks.
Summer pushes a hold button — a lazy sit in the sun and read button that carries suntans and waterskiing and vacations in its bag of tricks. It’s the end of school days for some, a marked change of pace regardless of schools just because it’s hot. Swimming pools fill, beaches overload, air conditioners do, too. I can only hope the summer of my eternity isn’t the same heat as the rest of my eternity, or I’ve really goofed, unless lazy is the button I push and I have a lazy eternity — which I can’t like very much, unless that’s what I’m supposed to learn in my eternity, because I haven’t learned it here.
Fall is my second favorite season. It’s transitional. It’s beautiful. While preparing for the cold winter eternity, it begins with a cooling of the evenings even if days stay hot through October here. And then, the colors burst in a crescendo — only to fall like my ability to be clever at the end of a long day of pushing against that heavy door hoping to find something, anything on the other side. Sometimes we’re lucky. Those are the good days. Sometimes we have to keep pushing. I am able to fathom an eternity of fall. It’s a beautifully crisp, stout and sure season that lets in passion. Yes. That works.
Finally, the winter does come, covering me in negativity: a dirty snow. It’s not the white fluffy snowflake snow, but the coal-gray, smoky, slushy, shoe-wrecking snow of the city. So, I cannot fathom this eternity because spending the rest of my time in a dirty-snow city would suck. My fathom factor for an eternity of winter is exactly zero. Maybe minus something.
It could be important to question where we’ll spend eternity. I don’t know. Maybe instead, we should ask in what season we are spending our lives. For we don’t really know there is an eternity. In fact, eternity might be right here. Right now. Who’s to know, really?
Death Is Not Random
Death is not random. It just looks like it. Freak accidents. Chance missteps. Absurd consequences of non-events.
Birth is not random. Looks like it but it’s not! How’d you get here, then? Of all the little eggs that don’t get fertilized down there, How…Did… YOU…Come…To…Be?
Planning, I tell you, planning.
It’s the same on the other end. Your death is as planned as your life. The slots are all there, waiting to be filled. Yours was waiting to be filled by you when your egg and sperm met in a specifically non-random mating of DNAs. It was a carefully planned time. It had to be. Why would anything as important as your life be a result of a capricious, haphazard encounter?
So if you accept that the beginning of YOU was very well planned, then you should be able to agree that the end of you is also. You were not present for the beginning. You didn’t know your birthdate. And you cannot know your death date…yet. But what if you could? What…If…You…Could… know when you were going to die? What would you do with that information?