Words for Mortality

Opportune. How would I know to be worried about what I do if the risk of dying were not involved? I could go on and on making mistakes, biding my time to change my ways, or not. "Immortality" (alive and incapable of death) would be an ocean with no shore - worse yet, land without an ocean to gaze out on, wondering what lies beyond the foreseeable horizon.

Skeptical. I am in life but I do not see life. I am alive but cannot qualify or quantify death except by faith. Faith provides me with everything I need to know - but not everything knowable - so life is skeptical of death, and perhaps death is skeptical of life. What is the value of this fleeting thing, this temporary state, a way station for a quantity of minerals, tissues, salts, and water? But faith is not skeptical of mortality. Faith knows exactly the depths breadth, and quality of death, for what was death before He came into the world to redeem Life? Death was known only in its partial, natural state. Death was a false prophet of an end it was not death's to claim. Now we have the full measure of death and of mortality, as much by what does not belong to death as what does.

Musical. As one's fingers strum a guitar, or as starling sing to the dusk, we move in and around our mortality, taking risks great or small and those being only the ones we are aware of. As a child I would wonder, if I am delayed at something even 5 seconds might that not decide my fate; where otherwise I would not be hit by a car, or some such mortal event? How little I understood the serious nature of one's life, that it is not one's own to do with as one wishes, but God's gift, to live out in heartfelt service. What after all is music, but the truth in one's ears?

Cubed. Approach mortality lightly or with serious intent and it is the same on all sides. You might upend it, by a tremendous effort, but you will tire and let go, and down it will clatter, presenting exactly the same aspect as before. So you will call in friends to help you sustain your efforts at unbalancing mortality, but after a remarkably brief interlude, you will be staring at each other over the tedium and strain of that collective effort and lose sight of mortality altogether. Look out, lest it crush your foot when it falls!

Saucy. I mean it moves its hips about and looks you straight in the eye as if it knows what it wants, and perhaps it does. Maybe this is all it wants, my life. Is that all you want? You can have it, if you know what to do with it, you'll have to show me first. No? No ideas? More winking and strutting about? Poor mortality, poor death, without a future to believe in.

Resolute. Mortality means business, and business is good. And good is the word I use to describe a thing, and being mortal, my passing judgment on whether a thing is good or not relies on standards not of my making, you can be sure of that, otherwise I am, like mortality, saying one thing but believing another. For death is no more true than is life, only less so, for we cannot die again once dead. But eternal life is ours for the asking.