Men speak often of pleasure, seldom of joy. Pleasure is somewhere and something; joy is nowhere and nothing. Pleasure is planned, imagined, curated; joy is spontaneous, uncontrolled and now. Something else: Pleasure has an end. That’s where pain is.
I agree. It behooves us to deepen our relationship with death, to look at it straight on, to talk to our children about it. From a planetary perspective, death and birth require one another. Can we imagine what the earth experience would be like if nobody died?
Things that begin well end that way too.
Siena’s famous daughter: “All the way to heaven is heaven.”
And the unavoidable corollary, that it is hell all the way to hell? True, too.
Men's Work 