Life Pupose: Die Right

This is from a longer post at my own blog, Vagabond Blues, about "How I Survived the Mountains of Navarra."

It seems to me, after much contemplation, that the most succinct description of the meaning or purpose of life is this: to prepare for death. Preparing for death can mean only one thing: to learn what it is like to die. This can be done through various techniques, most commonly sex, drugs, trance dreaming, and extreme fright or danger (also of course illness, despair, crisis, and so forth). Note that we have already covered most of the major preoccupations (positive and negative) of the average person during his or her eighty odd years of existence. The problem is that none of these things, taken by themselves as ends in and of themselves, have any meaning or purpose. Hence they become either distractions to be indulged in, or afflictions to be endured. As preparations for the ultimate act of dying, however, they are equally valid, and positive or negative only so far as we use them, or not, to break down our resistance to the inevitable, and come to embrace it. For only by embracing death can we endeavor to dance past it.