Does mortality make life meaningful?

Between the worlds richest swimming in pursuit of money thats morphed into a metaphor to the poorest brutally struggling for survival and all shades of making a living in between life could be a robust distraction from death itself Just as art is a distraction from lifeNot that one needs a series of celebrityfamilysuicideCOVID deaths in a year to become aware of ones mortality Still could the fact of people in 2020 across the world sitting helplessly at home observing deaths of copassengers watching them casually pass on the way life usually passes by have a universally transformative effect on humans per seNo way for me to know so I asked the Buddhist young monk The Venerable Tenzin Priyadarshi if he had a view on this It has brought us closer to the idea of mortality in a way that we couldnt have experienced before Venerable suggests adding thats a good thingHumans are rare species aware of mortality Its remarkable what that selfawareness can do he says Pointing chiefly to how it lends meaning to moments If this was your last day imagine the gravity of words youd say to someone or if it was the last time they were meeting you we might actually become kinder more honest and caring individuals by that simple reflectionIf people thought about death more often perhaps they would engage less in the meaninglessness of things which sometimes could be an entertainingwonderful pastime But a vivid experience that moments are actually fleeting adds a level of seriousness to life It doesnt mean you lose sense of humourfun just that you begin to enrich every aspect knowing that this could be the last dayLike that famous Sartre line no Do you think I count the days There is only one day left Always starting over It is given to us at dawn And taken away from us at duskIndiaborn Venerable also marks a distinction between how eastern and western cultures funereally respond to death While the Hindu ritual is loudly ceremonial inyourface often walking the talk on the street its a very raw experience bringing it to closer to nature by way of the cycle of life and death what happens oftentimes in the West is the cosmetic cover around death There are open caskets yes but the body you look at with layers of makeup wearing a threepiece suit or beautiful dress takes away from the aspect that this chapter is coming to an endOr as his late friend Catholic monk Thomas Keating used to say Death has a very negative PR in the West Not that there is any right or wrong way to deal with the passing on of a loved one Its way too personal So have individual responses been to the totalitarian spectre of corona a microscopic virus beating mighty humans each of whom has different threshold levels of how they must physicallymentally deal with this new paranormalA common plight though has been a sense of loneliness and alienation that people have experienced Venerable points out If we discovered solitude as a result understood the beauty of human connection that wed taken for granted thought about the true essentials of our liveshellip Hopefully if these were the learnings we wont go back to the mechanical rutEternal optimist polymath monk Venerable who runs the Dalai Lama Centre for Ethics and Transformative Values at Massachusetts Institute of Technology MIT has written this lovely memoir Running Toward Mystery which lives up to its subtitle The Adventure of an Unconventional Life Most of all when he deals with a realm thats beyond the polarising binary of rational and irrational having run away from boarding school at age 10 quite literally chasing a visual dream to land right on itMy conversation with him about going from cynical to clinical the importance of interspiritual dialogue acknowledgement of churchstate separation as a farce and organised religion being another human weapon for power and greed took place for Jaipur Literature Festival in Colorado while Im in Bombay and hes in California COVID19 of course explains this Its 7 pm for him and a punishing 8 am for meWhich only leads me to inquire if religion and philosophy let alone Buddhism has anything to say about morning people and night people while never the twain meet Thats individual preferenceDoesnt matter when you sleep so long as youre not sleepdeprived which is a major issue of our times As a society we havent been as sleepdeprived as over the last 5060 yearsWhatever your wonky patternscycles hopefully you slept enough in 2020 As for when you were up I dont know a better exchange than between Charlie Brown and Snoopy Some day we will die Snoopy True but on all the other days we will notMayank Shekhar attempts to make sense of mass culture He tweets mayankw14 Send your feedback to mailbagmiddaycomThe views expressed in this column are the individuals and dont represent those of the paper