You don’t have to be called Madame Curie, Beethoven, Hannie Schaft, Nelson Mandela or Einstein to be immortal. Nor does it have anything to do with religion. Every person is immortal because of his actions in this life. Every person has an indelible influence on the course of things, including the future. Regardless of whether you were a good person or a bad guy, at the end of your life you will have ,moved a stone in a river on Earth., Despite the fact that at a certain point no one will remember that you were ever there.
Death
The mere thought of our death gives many people an uneasy feeling. Because humans are programmed in such a way that we shudder at the idea that we will no longer be there at some point. As long as we are mentally and physically healthy and live in peace, we want to stay on this earth as long as possible.
- To this end, nature has built in the emotion of fear, which ensures that we avoid danger.
- And we have a constant healthy appetite and thirst, which ensures that our biological machinery remains intact.
- This also applies to the phenomenon of pain, which also protects our body against danger.
The phenomenon of death is so disturbing and instills so much fear that many embrace a religion in which immortality is offered provided we adhere to certain rules on earth and, above all, pay church contributions. But more and more often we hear around us, even among originally religious adults, that with death our life probably ends definitively. After all, eternal life does not seem to be everything, because what do you have to talk about with your wife after a million years, when only then ,the first second, of your eternal life has passed.
Immortality
Although our mental and physical life probably ends definitively the moment we die, we are more immortal because of our actions than we often realize. And that’s not counting the fact that we reproduce and have offspring.
Digitized forever
Many will probably still have photos of family members that were taken shortly before the Second World War when photography was still in its infancy. If you lived before then, you are out of luck. Because if you weren’t important enough for a painted portrait, no one will know who you were and what you looked like. That is a bit different today, because our posterity will probably still know who we were and what we looked like in 1000 years. There is also a good chance that we can be traced on the internet for centuries after our earthly life.
Remarkably immortal
Many now deceased persons have become immortal because of their actions in life. You can become immortal because of your sporting, mental and social achievements, but also because of your misdeeds. A random selection from the file:
- In the field of sports, including Abe Lenstra and Fannie Blankers-Koen.
- When paintings by Rembrandt and Picasso are finally consumed in a million years, humanity will still be able to enjoy them digitally.
- Musically, Beethoven, Bach, Gershwin and the Beatles will be heard for a while.
- Writers and poets such as Vondel and Jules Verne will live on for a while.
- Also applies to politicians such as Nelson Mandela, Willem Drees and Abraham Lincoln.
- Scientist Einstein with his theory of relativity and inventor of penicillin A. Fleming.
- Other heroes from the past such as the many explorers, resistance heroes such as Jan van Schaffelaar and Hannie Schaft
- Unfortunately, there are also countless well-known scoundrels and dictators whose names cause eternal sorrow.
Invisibly immortal
Now we come to the heart of the matter. Because although today we have all been digitized forever through photos, by the government in archives and possibly on the internet, after a few hundred years no one will be really interested in us anymore. Except occasionally, perhaps by a descendant who is going to do family tree research.
But every person does perform actions that matter in their lives, because they significantly influence the course of things.
As a colleague, association member, neighbor, friend or family member, every person certainly changes history. Because in your capacity as a sports friend, aunt, dance partner , niece and choir member you have a great influence on your environment. Most clearly, of course, in the relationship between mother/father and your child. If Einstein’s parents had not sent little Albert to school, we might never have heard of him. If Frederic Chopin had not been allowed to learn piano, we would not have beautiful compositions today. So those parents certainly had a major influence on the future.
Everyday life influences the future
But there are also many seemingly insignificant actions that have a huge influence on the course of things. Because if Jansen had gotten into his car a few seconds later, he would not have had a collision. But because he had that clash, he met a charming nurse who he married.
The world would have been given a different impulse if he had gotten into the car a minute later, because he would have inevitably encountered Marie, who would have fathered an influential writer, who would have published recipes through her cookbooks, which coincidentally turned out to be a cure for epilepsy found, which allowed a bastard with that disease to live longer, who could therefore have sex with a woman, who gave birth to a daughter who became the first female president of the USA.
Meetings
Whether we meet someone or not is therefore a matter of coincidence. Being a few seconds faster or slower means that we meet other people and therefore get different ideas, etc. Whether or not we read a certain book, see a film or talk to someone also influences our opinion and therefore our actions. We do or don’t do certain things based on the advice of often random people. But of course we also have that influence on others. Even asking your son to do some shopping at the supermarket can have unimaginable consequences if something happens that catches his attention and perhaps influences his actions.
Bram Vermeulen’s stone
This beautiful song aptly illustrates that in fact everyone is immortal:
I have moved a stone in a river on earth,
the water is different than before.
You can’t stop the flow of a river, the water always finds a way around it, maybe once filled with snow and rain, the river takes my pebble with
it and then lets it rest smooth and round
in the lee of the sea.
I moved a stone in a river on earth, now I know that I will never be forgotten, I provided proof of my existence, because by moving that one stone, the
stream will never go the same way again.