Maybe You Should Pity The Gods

Ode to Mortality

What if the gods could watch us like a reality series? How close would they be to the edge of their seats, biting their nails as they watched us fragile humans trying to live, knowing we will die? That all our carefully crafted plans and beautiful visions of the future could be crushed in an instant, and everything great or small in our lives, all we’ve built, all our relationships, hopes, dreams, and in time, even our memories, destined to vanish.

Lives destroyed, others derailed, fortunes turning, crippling diseases, body-breaking accidents, and no matter who we are or what we’ve done, all of us at the mercy of indiscriminate slaughter. Kings and peasants living by the same rule: all must die.

No repeats. No do-overs. No second chances.

Yet, we strive forward, engaging in the impermanence of it all: loving, hating, laughing, crying, despairing, hoping, all while knowing everything will be taken away.

That we do anything with our lives is the greatest defiance against our fate: To be condemned to die and choose to live, taking part in the beauty and terror of human existence. To say to death, “You may define my end, but not my life. Do what you please when your time comes, but until then, this time is mine.”

How much would the gods root for our defiance, and their hearts break when ours did? How much would they grieve when, against our efforts and pleas, our fires were unceremoniously extinguished?

How epic would our lives seem to them? To those who could never know virtue, for there is no courage without risk, no value in discipline if you can’t waste your life, or in wisdom if you can’t ruin it. And who could never spend themselves in a worthy calling, renouncing all other possible lives, forever.

How deeply would they crave our experience? The urgency of our mortality pressing us to make our time between two voids matter. Our choices significant because they are limited. Our lives meaningful because they are finite.

What a cruel fate for the gods to be cursed with immortality. They can’t know the worth of anything, for they have eternity to do it all. Their actions and choices turned inconsequential given infinite time. Their existence diluted to nothing, a drop of dye in an ocean.

What is it to be eternal? A musical note that never ends: noise. Would they not trade eternity for significance, even if short-lived? To bloom and fall like cherry blossoms, their beauty bound to their transience.

How gripped would they be by our stories? Not to find out how they end, that’s known from the start, but to watch them unfold. The drama of an entire life burning bright like a supernova if only for a fraction of a cosmic second, time which means nothing to the universe, but everything to us.

How long have we looked up to the heavens, envying the immortality of the gods while cursing our own fate, not realizing that to them, we were the gods, and our lives the ones worthy of envy?

Gather ‘round, oh mighty gods, and watch these puny mortals struggle through grander lives than you could ever live.