Thursday, August 4, 2011

Immortality

Can you imagine living for hundreds of years? What would that be like? There are times when I wish I could live for thousands of years, experiencing many different eras, art, fashion and music trends in human history. It's not a new quesiton, in fact it has been explored by familiar characters many times through written works by Jonathan Swift in his illustration of the island of immortals in Gulliver's Travels, J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan and Bram Stoker's Dracula. Even more recently the idea of immortality has been portrayed in film by Stephen King's The Green Mile and vampire movies like Catherine Hardwicke's Twilight. Our culture is fascinated with the thought of everlasting life or life after death. I find it interesting how many of the best stories we have present a skewed or distorted view of a life lived over several hundred or thousand years. In fact I don't believe there are many stories at all that present an immortal life lived happily ever after. Probably because in these kinds of stories life doesn't end. They are just stories. Immortality is a difficult concept for us. Probably because we can only see the world in its current context, confined to its limitations. What if we could be free from those limitations? What if we could dream of a different kind of immortality? A life that is everlasting and abundantly filled with joy and peace. An immortal life that sets us free to run, jump, create, write, work... live. I believe that life is possible. Not just a story.

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