I’m at an age where thoughts of death – my death – visit me daily. Maybe it’s the morning before I get up. Maybe it’s in my commute to or from work. Maybe it’s before my evening meal, or just before I go to bed.

I’m not religious, so I don’t believe there is some magical soul in my body that leaves at the moment of death, destined for immortality. From all I know, one’s brain and inner thoughts are two sides of the same coin. There are no thoughts without a working brain. If the brain goes, so do you.

And when you go, then all your memories, every experience, everything and everyone you ever encountered, it all disappears. As if it never was.

The Great Transition.

That moment between being and not being. Consciousness and oblivion. The moment the brain stops forever. Knowing and remembering, then nothing: either past or future.

This is our inevitable fate.

Simple.

And yet.

There is something about being. It kind of goes to the ‘why’ question. Why consciousness at all, in this great unconscious universe that doesn’t care if we exist or don’t?

And I have no simple, logical answer for that.