The dead are dead, but the living are dying. Life is inescapably change. Unchangingly change, we might allow with a wink. Life is waking and sleeping, eating and shitting, and all other manner of interlocked opposites; but also, here still, it is terminal. Though we move through many a year, tasting each delightful season, the journey ends. Though we’re ever moving in these cycles, the cycles stop; we stop and die. Death then, bringing many a slow change to the corpse, is yet an unchanging state itself. Alive, we might move near death countless times, but death never moves nearer life. It is in the nature of life to want to change, even unto death, for it is found that comfort, safety, and security are the prerequisites and drivers of war; it is, contrarily, in the nature of death to remain.
Yet, if life is moving nearer death, what is it changing from? If we are heating up, we were colder, and so we have an idea of hot and cold; though they are imaginary, they are quite real. If we are moving toward death, what are we moving from? If you say life, I might agree, but then we see a difference, a changeless life, a perfect life, as hot is the perfect of hotter; hotter moves to hot, colder to cold. The ordinary life is moving toward death from the perfected life.
Death is quite tangible, though, and this perfect life is only known through the imagination, as hot or cold is known, not in it being an exact state we ever see but in the motions between these imagined poles.
Between death and life is living, moving, being; it is change, but change is ever looking to change itself. This final change into changelessness then is either into the more common thing, the natural decent into death, or some uncommon, perhaps unrealized, thing, a perfected life.
“This day I call the heavens and the earth as witnesses against you that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live and that you may love the Lord your God, listen to his voice, and hold fast to him. For the Lord is your life, and he will give you many years in the land he swore to give to your fathers, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.”
Deuteronomy 30:19-20
Tale Told 