As the dates below will show, this blog The Chronicles of Canada Slim one of two has suffered from neglect. The purpose of The Chronicles of Canada Slim is to capture in writing my adventures prior to the calendar year.
But much has been happening since the finale of my Zwingli Way Walk recorded here : an accident which broke both my arms, work commitments, a visit to Canada, the Corona virus, and the decision to work here in Turkey. As well, other writing projects have also suffered, but as long as I breathe I will still believe that these too will eventually be accomplished.
Death is the one commonality we all share, regardless of whether pauper or prince, peasant or president, saint or sinner. And it is accepting this inevitability that all of us must come to grips with, in our own way, in our own time. Perhaps an exception to this rule of the suicidal or the painfully sick are the lives of those in risky professions, such as health care, the police force, the military. As death is part of, and the end of, life, the question we all ask and the answer we all fear is what, if anything, follows death.
According to various ideas about the afterlife, the essential aspect of the individual that lives on after death may be some partial element, or the entire soul or spirit, of an individual, which carries with it and may confer personal identity or, on the contrary nirvana. In some views, this continued existence takes place in a spiritual realm, and in other popular views, the individual may be reborn into this world and begin the life cycle over again, likely with no memory of what they have done in the past.
In this latter view, such rebirths and deaths may take place over and over again continuously until the individual gains entry to a spiritual realm or otherworld. Some belief systems, such as those in the Abrahamic tradition, hold that the dead go to a specific plane of existence after death, as determined by God, or other divine judgment, based on their actions or beliefs during life. In contrast, in systems of reincarnation, such as those in the Indian religions, the nature of the continued existence is determined directly by the actions of the individual in the ended life.
