The diving board and the water
You are looking at time wrong
Have you ever jumped off a diving board into a pool, or a cliff at the sea? There is a moment, when you may stand up there contemplating the jump.
You know how high you are. You want to jump. (It didn’t seem so high before. It’s really high up!) But you know you’re going to jump: it gives you butterflies in the stomach. You are in the moment. Exactly in the moment. Totally alive. Whoa! What a rush.
But in that moment, in that palpable present. Just when you think about doing it, jumping off… in that last possible moment, you stop.
You may have started the movement towards the edge, tensed your legs and visualised the jump, but you get a little bit too scared at the last moment.
In that palpable present moment, you go from being right up there on the board - on the edge - to potentially being in the water, in the matter of a few pounding heartbeats.
In your mind, you’re already there, you just need the courage to jump.
You know it won’t be so bad in the water, it’s just the letting go of the edge you find difficult.
This is how we can think about being dead.
We go from one point in the present that we know: the diving board, the edge, the feeling of butterflies.
To something more unknown: the jump, the fall, the water.
But: being dead is a totally unexplainable experience.
It doesn’t fit into anything we know.
Because unlike diving off the board, we know on some level that we won’t hit the water, or feel hitting the water.
It’s hard to grasp: trying to feel something that is exactly about not being able to feel something.
So? Well, I invite you to divorce yourself from how you feel about being alive now, with how you might feel about being dead in the future.
It is not an either-or situation. You are just looking at time wrong.
There is a present version of you that is alive, and there is also a present version of you that is dead. Don’t think of the experience of dying as jumping into water from a great height, full of anxiety, anticipation, fear, wonder.
Try to realise that you are already in the water.
You’ve always been in the water.
Because at the same time: you are standing on the board. You will always be standing there, filled with excitement and butterflies.
When it comes to being alive and being dead, you are doing both, always, forever.
According to Eternalism, all moments in time exist simultaneously, like pages in a book.
Right now, you're alive in this moment. One day, you'll be dead. Both states exist in what we call "the present," just like how all pages in a book exist even when you're only reading one. When you're dead, it will feel like "now," just as being alive feels like "now."
Instead of seeing life as "before" and death as "after," we can understand them as different points in an eternal present - like different locations in space.
I believe this perspective can help reduce anxiety about death and guide us to live more fully in the current moment.
By viewing time this way - as a complete "block" where all moments exist together - we can better accept both life and death as permanent parts of our total existence, rather than seeing death as a frightening future state we're moving toward.
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