The curiousness of mortality

Confronting impermanence

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By: Leonid Afremov

“Mortal as I am, I know that I am born for a day. But when I follow at my pleasure the serried multitude of the stars in their circular course, my feet no longer touch the earth.”
― Ptolemy

I was 12 when a kids’ cartoon snippet on primetime television swung open for me the doorway to the world of mortality. The snippet in question featured the silhouette of a faceless hooded character holding a scythe aloft, waiting, with saintly composure, behind a rickety wooden door with the words ‘Life’ emblazoned on it. There was a matter-of-fact mordancy about it all. This moment, as innocuous as it seemed then, would go on to define my grasp of life’s impermanence. There was, in my mind, an unexplainable conflict between the pursuit of transcendence and the finitude of my banal existence. Yet, within the humble confines of my mortality, lay a desire to fathom the fathomless - to traverse the untamed wilderness of existence with one burning question: what do we make of this fleeting expedition, we call life?