Shelf Life

People—that includes you and me—are just like a can of cling peaches or a box of Wheaties sitting on the shelf at the supermarket.  Each of these items has a “best used by” date and each has a pull date.  So do people.

Of course the peach slices, the cereal flakes and the people do not know these dates in advance; the food and the people have vision only within their respective packagings.  For foodstuffs, the dates are stamped on the outside of the can or box, invisible.  People are spared the frustration of not being able to read the dates they know are there— such dates are unknowable by mortals until it is far too late.

Inside the can, the peaches are clinging to their freshness as they soften and lose tone.  Inside the box, flakes are resisting the moldy invasion, the brittleness that comes with time, the rather rank odor of age.  For you and me?  Same game.  Our sweat and effluents slowly replace our finer physical attributes, and our minds do not fare much better in many cases.  As friction erodes our souls, the over-all effect is not salutary.

Surely life informs us when we are past our prime use date and then, is it some black specter  that whips us off our shelf with no warning? Or does molecular biology simply apply its ineffable mechanics and we are never the same again?

One day the people who stock the supermarket shelves pull the peaches and Wheaties off view and toss them into a bin to be carted off for uncertain disposition.  The peaches may go to the hogs, the flakes to the dog food.  Or all will be buried, burned, disrespected, disbursed to fire or earth.  Does that denouement sound familiar where people are concerned?

All categories we are discussing here, food and people, are constructed of the same matter.  Our atomic structure is consistent and, also, on arrival of our pull dates all of our atoms are freed for resurrection.  Only it is most unlikely that peaches are reborn as peaches, Wheaties as breakfast food for champions, or that you are reincarnated as the tennis pro or politician you had in mind.  The odds of your author finding himself a human poet also strike me as remarkably slim.   Cans and carcasses and bones rust in the ground, boxes  and bodies rot into earth, contents effervesce into space and time, and it is slight solace that we join the great one-ness of existence when we cannot carry our wallets, minds and a few prized possessions with us.

Not only is our end a mystery but also our beginning, our design and fabrication.  Religions often fill in our history, but since history is behind us and we can only see ahead, we are left to either believe or disbelieve, each result unchallengeable until it is too late.

I have asked friends and family to turn my can around, look under my box, examine my wrappings and convey my “best used by” and pull dates, and they do report some visual observations,  but we people  are arranged on our shelves so that the small black dates are not visible and open for reportage.

Our little chat is about over.  I forgot to ask, so apologies but – how are you feeling today?  Because your clock is running in the marketplace of life. It’s just that you are likely mis-shelved, perhaps marked down unfairly, and the aisles in which you are stacked are so poorly lit….