Ring the bells that still can ring.
Forget your perfect offering.
There is a crack in everything.
That's how the light gets in.
- Leonard Cohen
One way or another, of course, everything falls apart. Trees, rocks, clouds, aardvarks, whales, turtles, tambourines, tadpoles, telephones, tacos and tufted tit-mice. Not a one can hold it together forever. Like wise with ice caps, ocean floors, continents and (sooner or later) Los Angeles. Every one and everything is subject to falling apart.
Of course, no life (including you and me) would even exist if it weren't for the fact that cells fall apart (call it, "divide," if you will). And most astronomers are pretty clear that our entire universe is busy falling further and further apart. Even married couples begin their life of love together with the words, "Till death do us part."
So, with everything else in creation falling apart, why does it flip us out when our lives follow suit? Why do we freak out when our lives come apart at the seams? When everything nailed down comes loose?
Maybe it's because it disturbs our sense of order. Maybe it's because we sadly realize (once again) that we're not in control. Maybe it's because we have come to imagine that our lives have somehow risen above everything else; that we are not subject to the same rules. Or maybe we lack the trust that somehow things will, one way or another, reform and reorganize themselves into something new.
Whatever it is, we don't like it. None of us do. And so we run around with rolls of mental and emotional duct tape, trying desperately to stick it all back together and keep things as they were. Of course, it doesn't work. It never works - not for long anyway. And eventually, we are left holding the pieces.
It is interesting, however, that as our universe continues to fly further and further apart, astronomers don't seem to be worried. They rather describe the phenomenon as "expanding."