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A post shared by M U H A M M E D S A L A H (@muhammedsalah_) on Sep 17, 2020 at 2:26pm PDT

In this world, we celebrate birth and we mourn death.

We do everything in our power to avoid death, to fear it, to judge it.

There is so much judgment on death; how wrong it is, how sad it is, how awful, and how tragic.

My question is: why?

Why is death so wrong?

Why do we have to have so much trauma when someone chooses to leave their body?

The earth doesn’t judge death.

The earth cares as much for death as it does for birth.

The one thing we all have in life is free will, and we deny it more than anything else. If we all have free will then we all have the choice to be born and to die.

We choose to come into the world and we choose when to leave.

That might be a hard concept for some of you to get and it’s perfectly fine to not quite get it. All I ask is that you allow yourself to be curious.

I remember when I was 16, and my mother woke me up in the middle of the night to give me the news that my 21-year-old brother had been killed in a car accident.

My first thought was, “Oh wow, he did it, he left the planet.’’ The truth is, I knew this was coming, I knew that he was going to leave. I used to have dreams of a funeral for my brother. I thought I was being dramatic imagining these things in the middle of the night. Yet, somehow, I knew.

Nevertheless, even with this knowing, I went through all the stages of grief like a lot of people; the shock, numbness, guilt, bargaining, anger, etc.

This was more about me than it was about him. Actually, it was all about me.

There was no acknowledgment of him and his choices in this grieving process. I was mourning my loss, mourning for everything that had now suddenly changed in my family, and for my parents’ sadness—for all of it. While that may be required, none of this was about acknowledging and honouring my brother.

There were so many people at that time projecting onto us, “what a tragedy, what a loss.” People thinking, “how do you deal with that?’’ ‘’how do you carry on?’’ Because the death of a young person is wrong, awful, and not supposed to happen in this world.

When someone dies, do they really die?

What if we acknowledged that nobody really dies and we are all infinite, so we don’t ever really die—we just change.

My brother changed. He was no longer in a body, and I couldn’t physically touch him or hug him, but he was around me. In fact, I became closer to him now than I did when he was in a body, and he started to help me in ways I could never explain.

After the grieving process started to pass which took many years, I saw how the sadness, the grief, and the heart-wrenching emotions of loss were not actually helping him. They, in fact, were making him stuck. Anytime he would talk to me, he kept telling me he was sorry, but he needed to leave.

Why was he always saying he was sorry? He spent years trying to tell us he was sorry. Why? Why would he have to apologize to us so much when it was a “car accident”?

Because we had so much pain after him leaving?

Because he was watching us now, walking around with so much sadness, so much grief, and so many regrets?

That’s what this world is telling you that you need to be.

You need to be sad, you need to cry, you need to mourn.

But, how is any of that acknowledging this beautiful being that is still around you, but has simply changed form?

That is what death is. Death is change.

We see it in nature all the time. The flowers are planted, they blossom, bloom, and they die. The earth doesn’t grieve for the flowers. The earth cares for the flowers, and allows the flowers to blossom, bloom, and also leave in their own timing.

The idea that we are all supposed to live into our old age, is a conclusion and a judgment.

Nature doesn’t create that way, so why do we think we should?

What if some of us come here for a short time?

What if sometimes this planet is too much and we need to get off it for a while?

What if we stopped pretending that this world and this existence is all there is?

What if we celebrated death as we do birth?

What if we honoured each person’s choice to embody and be born on this planet, and when they choose to also leave their body and change form?

Would that make this planet a more enjoyable place to be?

Would it, maybe, give people more choice and allow them to stay a bit longer, knowing that they do have choice?

Nobody wants to feel like they have no choice.

That they have to stay here.

What if we had as much caring and celebration for death as we did for birth?

Maybe our world wouldn’t be as insane as it is now if we did.