Are You A Living Human?

My Office
1453 hours

"But the issue is not only life and death but our existence before God and our being judged by him. All of us were sinners before him and worthy of condemnation."
- Hans Urs von Balthasar

Everyone has an experience of life and will experience death someday

I'm in my office, just did my work like usual, when I received message from my fellow pianist. He asked me this:

"What is life? What is death?"

Well I guess that you probably think the simplest definition is when you breath, when you walk, when you talk, when you do something, when you still look like a human, when you act like human, then you still alive, and you have life. When you not breathing, when you're not walking, when the blood no longer flowing through you vain, then you're dead. It's simple. Then, he came up with the next question:

"Is it necessary to keep your honor in your death.. or did honor just affect you when you are alive?"

When I got this question, I came to think further. What does it mean? If I'm dead, will I ever received honor from the other people, or I just received it when I was alive? What's the reason to give last honor for the dead? Do we need to respect dead people in their funeral, even if they didn't really see us giving honor to them? Well, this is what I thought.

There's life(sei/生) and death(shi/死)

Life is when you are really existed. Did you really see people as... well... people. If we acknowledge the existence of other people, then we see them as alive, even if their body were dead already. We know that he/she was once existed in our life, and we still remember him/her. That's the meaning of alive. Death is when you don't really exist as a human. If you don't acknowledge the existence of other people, they're dead to you. You know the law that say "Don't kill", but if you actually hate people, you've killed them in your heart, thus makes them dead to you. Then think of this: if you still respect people, even in their death, you make them alive in your memories. But, if you just don't really see other people as people, and you don't even see them as living human even when they are actually breathing and indeed... alive, and maybe you, who don't really see a funeral as sacred place for the dead, are actually not human, cause you don't have feelings, thus making you dead as well.

Let's take a time thinking now. Are you "alive" or "dead"? Are your existence being recognize or just being ignored? Are you treating people as human like yourself? Are you really see this writer as a human or robot? and last but not least...

"Are you a human?"

Keep calm and have a tea. Living God Bless you. ^_^