Without the ups and downs, it would just be a flatline anyway.

From the time I was young, I had a strong sense of others emotions. Possibly being fifth of six kids and being the one inclined to sit back and watch, rather than joining in the fighting.

While I might have been distinct as the observer, my early sense of the others was more factions and desires, than seeing my family as a bunch of discrete individuals. I was a node in my network and the various threads would pull on me in various ways. I had the unfortunate ability to see various sides of the arguments and how they were competing desires, much as our personal emotions often compete and the head has to referee.

As I grew older, this sense of being rooted in my world has only grown stronger, so for me, the real death wouldn’t be my own mortality, but being cut off from the world that is me and I am it.

We are mobile organisms, with a sequential process of perception, so we think of time as the point of the present going past to future, but the reality is that change turns future to past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns. So there is only this state of presence, with some essence of sentience bubbling up through it, like light shining through frames of film.

While the movie might end, the light just goes on. It is the presence.