What is your direction in life? Towards up or down, stairs or elevator. Preferences are the key factor in our lives, connecting with the past and the future. And lines represent boundaries in some periods of our lives. Usually in our childhood, when we live with our parents. The growing up is an upward process from babyhood to childhood to teenage years to adulthood. At the same time, aging of a healthy bodies is a downward process. All aspects are present in every moment of our lives. I think that every new day leading up to death, we should take a step upwards to maintain the balance. Well, what does it mean to step upwards? It's a long story and there is not one answer, maybe in another post.

"In the last week of June, 1863, all the London daily papers published a paragraph with the “sensational” heading, “Death from simple over-work.” It dealt with the death of the milliner, Mary Anne Walkley, 20 years of age, employed in a highly-respectable dressmaking establishment, exploited by a lady with the pleasant name of Elise. The old, often-told story, was once more recounted. This girl worked, on an average, 16½ hours, during the season often 30 hours, without a break, whilst her failing labour-power was revived by occasional supplies of sherry, port, or coffee. It was just now the height of the season. It was necessary to conjure up in the twinkling of an eye the gorgeous dresses for the noble ladies bidden to the ball in honour of the newly-imported Princess of Wales. Mary Anne Walkley had worked without intermission for 26½ hours, with 60 other girls, 30 in one room, that only afforded 1/3 of the cubic feet of air required for them. At night, they slept in pairs in one of the stifling holes into which the bedroom was divided by partitions of board. And this was one of the best millinery establishments in London. Mary Anne Walkley fell ill on the Friday, died on Sunday, without, to the astonishment of Madame Elise, having previously completed the work in hand." (1)

"....in a free nation, where slaves are not allowed of, the surest wealth consists in a multitude of laborious poor...."(2)

"Some years ago, as an already established environmental philosopher, I had a close encounter with food/death, death as food for a large predator. I was seized by a Saltwater Crocodile, largest of the living saurians, heirs to the gastronomic tastes of the ancient dinosaurs. By a fortunate conjunction of circumstances I survived. Since then it has seemed to me that our worldview denies the most basic feature of animal existence on planet earth - that we are food and that through death we nourish others. The food/death perspective, so familiar to our ancestors, is something the human exceptionalism of western modernity has structured out of life. Attention to human foodiness is tasteless. Of course we are all routinely nibbled both during and after life by all sorts of very small creatures, but in the microscopic context our essential foodiness is much easier to ignore than in one where we are munched by a noticeably large predator.......I vividly recall my own disbelief and outrage when confronted with being food for a crocodile. It was as if I had fallen into another universe, where I was just a piece of meat, all my special individual and species accomplishments subordinated to this one thing of being food! Certainly the predation experience is profoundly disruptive of Human Exceptionalism, which remains important force in our culture, and has profoundly shaped dominant practices of self, commodity, materiality and death - especially death."