Life As You See It.

http://paulocoelhoblog.com/2010/04/15/character-of-the-week-henry-miller/

I agree with part of what he says here, but not all of it. I absolutely love what he says about life; to see it as it is. However I also feel that moralities, ethics and laws are important. I personally find nothing miraculous about chaos. Same with security; I see the world exactly as he says one should, through the people and things, literature and music and I do find the world to be an incredibly rich and beautiful place. But I feel that I have the luxury to see it this way entirely because of the relative amount of security that I do enjoy. For someone like me it would become impossible to see the world this way with out it. Which is why I feel that some of what he says here is too generalized. I accept that without death there is no life, and I would never replace the pain that my own arm may give me with an artificial one. However, I would also not go out of my way to risk death or hurt my arm (I'm not a risk taker by nature). Yet I don't feel that this hinders my ability to see the world as it is. For someone like me it just enhances it.
In a way this may also explain how I feel about the Islamic concept of heaven. From what I've always been told about it, we will have anything and everything we could ever want in heaven, but what we won't have is our earthly relationships. We won't even remember the people we knew and loved on earth. It took me a long time to accept how it could be heaven without the people I loved, but in the end I got it. It's the lesser of two evils (figuratively). It's to protect us from the pain we might suffer if one of those we love doesn't make it to heaven. That's the difference between heaven and earth. In heaven we wouldn't sense the loss. I still don't like it, but I understand it now.

PS: Nadia, I hope I've made sense here, this was supposed to be a short comment on your post, but it kinda got away from me, and seemed a little too long to use as a comment :D Now, I have no idea what we learnt in our operative dentistry lecture today. This is what comes of facebook-ing during class!