More to Life than My Life

A reflection on NPR's This I believe There is More to Life than My Life.

This essay shows how when a family's cat dies, Jamaica Ritcher has to find a way to explain to her daughter what happens when we die. The author has no real beliefs about death until after her cat dies, but she is forced to search for an answer she can explain to her daughter.

"I am not the lonely human, plunked down on earth to aimlessly wander. I am a part of that earth and not going anywhere... Life, death: both are all around me, within my every breath."

In discovering her belief, Jamaica Ritcher finds a sense of peace and connectedness to everything in the world. This idea of being connected and all "part of the earth" links back to the Singer Solution to World Poverty Essay. The Singer essay argues that every choice that we make could potentially determine someone else's life. What we do or don't do here, today, could end up killing 10 children in some overseas country. The NPR essay on the other hand, says that if we are not connected by our actions then at least we are connected by the fact that we are human beings. We all get this short chance to live and we all die in the end. We are all of the earth and one day we will all return to it.

"Let children walk with Nature, let them see the beautiful blendings and communions of death and life, their joyous inseparable unity, as taught in woods and meadows, plains and mountains and streams of our blessed star, and they will learn that death is stingless indeed, and as beautiful as life." John Muir