How to Get to the Middle School

My sister, on a whim, decided to walk the 1.9 miles to the middle school tomorrow morning. Since she has never done this before (and has a sense of direction that far less accurate than mine), she discussed the entire route through with my mother.

While I was brushing my teeth, I heard a few snippets of their conversation. I heard them talking through lunch, friends, swimming and finally my mother had one piece of advice. She said, "Nishita, go through the light, past the graveyard, and when the road ends turn right on the new one."

In context, my mother was simply telling my sister that she had to walk straight down Noe and turn right on Woodland, but out of context, she could be giving us advice about death.

What, you may ask, is advice useful for when you are dead? Death is supposed to be a passive process, like falling asleep. But I think my mother, either unintentionally or on purpose, went against that idea with her comment.

First, you have to get through the light, or the bright light at the end of the tunnel. Nearly everyone who has had a near death experience talks about this light, but none of them have crossed it, so they are still alive. The first step of dying is getting through that light, and leaving your home, family, friends and mortal possessions behind you.

Death is not about simply lying in a graveyard and waiting for some mystical force to pull you up to heaven. After you get through the light you are not done. You cannot simply wait in a graveyard while your flesh rots off your bones and your clothes become as delicate is tissue paper. You have to do something - anything - to get past the graveyard. You cannot simply give up there, or you will never get to heaven.

Once you get past the graveyard, you must follow the road until it ends, and when it does, turn right on the new road leading to heaven. Then your journey to the afterlife will be complete It is a journey, after all, so you should not expect it to be passive.

But my mother's advice is applicable even while we are alive. When things do not go our way, when our brightest ideas shatter into a million sharp daggers of light and tear us apart, we are tempted to stay in our own graveyards of broken dreams, surrounded by our failures and free to wallow in our misery. But if we are to get anywhere in our lives - be it a middle school or a dream job - we must go past the graveyard.

If we go into the graveyard, curl up into a cold, bony ball of sadness, and cry tears for every failure, past, present and future, we will never get out. We will forever be stuck in that "inbetween." To everyone around us, we will be a failure, but we ourselves will never be sure. We will be stuck between failure and success because we cannot let go of what happened and what it done and what is over.

If we are to get anywhere in life, we must go past the graveyard, or we will be hopelessly lost. We must go past the graveyard, turn right on the new road, and start a new journey.