Experience Tumblr Like Never Before
The jellyfish, in theory, can live forever. When damaged or on the brink of starvation, it simply reverts back to a polyp. The medusae it releases are genetically identical to the adult and so it lives on.
And yet, despite this, the jellyfish dies. Either to predation or disease, it dies anyway. If you were a jellyfish and you saw your brother die—really die—would you understand? Would you grieve?
There is no life or death for the immortal jellyfish. There is only existence. You spend your days, endless or not, swimming in the dark. You are here, and that is all. You are a jellyfish, and that is enough. There is nothing else.
So if you saw your brother sink to the ocean floor, would you know he would never get up again?
Maybe.
If life and death mean nothing to the jellyfish, does the jellyfish even know it lives forever? Does it know how special it is? Or does it think itself mortal and perhaps insignificant? After all, it’s just a jellyfish.
We, like the jellyfish, will die. We will end as all things must. But we, like the jellyfish, have the capacity to live forever.
We have songs dating back thousands of years. We have stories of ancestors that we never got to meet. Even our faces are not our own, borrowed from someone else and made something new. We owe our existence to the people before us; we are the “medusae” they left behind. Dead men live as long as we have mouths to speak.
There is no life or death for the immortal jellyfish. There is only existence, and existence is no insignificant thing. Life cannot be wasted, only experienced, and therefore, changed.
So I guess my final question is this:
If you could live forever, would you know it?
I'm thinking about the immortal jellyfish.