The Long View: Being, in no particular order, 25 things I've bumped into along the way and have not forgotten. Yet.

11. Death
There's life and there's death. Depending on your point of view, one of them has a more promising future than the other. We've only experienced life in a direct, primary way. Death we don't know, not at all, though we may think we do. We know it only as a secondary experience. We know it once removed.  Even if we held a living being in our arms as they passed over, that's as close as we've come, as close as we can ever come until we pass over ourselves -- to a great beyond that for all we know may not be great at all. It may be tiny and dull and inconsequential if it exists at all. A near-death experience is not death, only nearly. We can speculate about how it feels when our time comes, but that's often nothing more than wishful thinking in which we go to a place of infinite splendor and wealth, where we get laid as much as we want, eat as much as we like and never get fat. Where we are surrounded by all we've ever loved. And Elvis is always at the next table. We can guess that all sensation stops, all thoughts and light and heat and cold cease forever. We can try to imagine, but we can't know until we know, and at that point, what will we know, you know?