Last month a friend in Hawaii sent me a link to a video about emperor penguins (http://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?v=SkY03n0_sD8&vq=medium). Perhaps I should say a video “of” emperor penguins, because it’s not “about” penguins in any sense that National Geographic or Sir David Attenborough would recognize. The film, produced by Defenders of Wildlife, is five minutes of unnarrated, uncaptioned footage of penguins in the snow, the adults loitering in their stately and inscrutable way, now and then giving an affectionate nudge to one of the impossibly cute babies at their feet.

            A few days later I passed the link on to some friends with the message: “Here’s something to help you believe in Life just as it is,” a statement whose sunny equanimity must have startled my friends, who are more accustomed to messages from me along the lines of, “Why am I still suffering? Haven’t I learned enough already?” Which perfectly illustrates the point I wish to convey about the penguins. Even though I’d learned way more about penguin habitats and lifestyles watching Dudley Moore’s “Really Wild Animals” years ago with my toddler son, the wordless video had a soothing effect on my spirit, which took some quiet contemplation to fully appreciate.

            Everybody loves penguins. They’re so unlikely (flightless birds surviving in the world’s most inhospitable environment), so cute (waddling around like pregnant maitre d’s), and so easy to laugh at. Penguin jokes abound, from Monty Python’s classic penguin sketch (“What’s that penguin doing on the telly?” “Standing.”) to Garrison Keillor’s metaphysical take on penguins (Two penguins are standing on an ice floe. The first penguin says, “You look like you’re wearing a tuxedo.” The second penguin says, “How do you know I’m not?”). But the truth isn’t that simple. Being a penguin isn’t just about sliding down the ice on your belly and vamping for the cameras; a penguin’s life is hard and fraught with danger. Adults are virtually helpless to protect nestlings from ravenous skuas and petrels. Babies who do survive to adulthood are prey to seals and orcas whenever they venture into the water. During breeding season, males and females take turns trekking 60 to 100 miles from nesting grounds to the open ocean to feed. The parent who stays behind to incubate eggs and care for the young can go without food for months at a time.

            Knowing something of the harsh realities of emperor penguin life is what made this particular film so poignant, because the penguins don’t seem to be brooding on their precarious existence. I don’t claim any special ability to peer into the penguin mind, but you can’t watch this film and believe that these gorgeous creatures are worrying about the effects of climate change on their habitat, or stressing over preparations for the next arduous march to faraway feeding grounds, or fretting over whether their chicks will survive long enough to sustain the emperor population. Yes, they engage in a daily struggle for survival, but they don’t appear to be vexed by questions of why they are here and what it all means. They just ARE, here and now, and for penguins, that seems to be more than enough.

            The evidence suggests that humans are the only living things with self-consciousness, the only animals who can look in a mirror and recognize that the image looking back at them is themselves. More importantly, though all living things die—bugs, trees, tortoises, microbes—we are the only creatures who know we are going to die, and that affects absolutely everything. One of the penguins in the film shuffles slowly and carefully across the ice carrying a fluffy gray chick on his feet, the way I used to stand on my father’s shoes as we “danced” to Benny Goodman records. That penguin may well have been a leopard seal’s lunch the day after his film debut, but if so, I’m certain he didn’t spend his last hours worrying about the possibility of his imminent demise. He just lived his penguin life moment by moment, driven by innate urges and needs, surviving as best he could without freighting his days with needless mental anguish.

            We, on the other hand, know we will die sooner or later, and for the vast majority of us, this knowledge causes fear. Not the sudden, adrenaline-fueled panic of stepping off a curb into the path of a speeding car, but a constant undercurrent of dread simmering just below the surface of consciousness, driving our ambitions and dictating our choices. Knowledge of our mortality can have a positive effect, of course, goading us to make the best use of our brief time on Earth and making the good things in life, like love and beauty, all the more precious. But I’ve come to the conclusion that fear of death—of the unknown, alien state of nonbeing—lies at the heart of most human mischief. Devoting one’s life and talents to amassing more money, territory, or stuff than the next guy, collecting hordes of Twitter followers, or starring in a reality TV show are all, at bottom, attempts to ensure a kind of false immortality. Even crimes of the heart can be an attempt to avert one’s gaze from the inevitable. In the Oscar-winning movie “Moonstruck,” when Rose suspects her husband Cosmo is being unfaithful, she asks her daughter’s fiancé why men cheat on their wives. “Maybe it’s because they fear death,” he says. When Cosmo comes home late that evening, Rose confronts him angrily: “I just want you to know that no matter what you do, you’re still gonna die, just like everybody else!” “Thank you, Rose,” says the nonplussed Cosmo.

            I’m not suggesting that anyone who isn’t in constant, excruciating pain should actually welcome the prospect of death, only that we might do well to shift our perspective a bit. I speak as someone who suffered for most of her life from an overweening fear of death, for which I blame my father. My grandfather died when I was nine years old, and my father insisted that I accompany him one evening for a viewing at the funeral home. My mistake on that occasion was trying to hide behind a potted fern in a far corner of the room, forgetting in my panic that my father did not countenance displays of fear in his children. Before I could yelp in protest, Dad hoisted me up by my armpits and dangled me over the side of the coffin so I could enjoy a close-up of my embalmed grandpa, on the same theory, I suppose, that shoving someone off a cliff would liberate them from a fear of heights. Not surprisingly, this tactic merely fostered an even more crippling dread of death and dying that I didn’t confront until I was in my late thirties.

            For those with similar fears and questions about the Great Unknown, the marketplace of ideas offers no end of possible answers. Atheists urge us to quit whining, grow some spine, and face the cold reality that this life is all there is. There’s nothing awaiting us after death, no punishments or rewards, no departed loved ones, no childhood pets bounding over a rainbow bridge into our tearful embrace. Just nothingness and nonbeing. Most religions, on the other hand, offer the hope that this life is merely a prelude to an eternal existence free of strife and pain. Some of these religions hold as an article of faith the resurrection of the physical body at some future apocalypse. This belief has fostered an entire industry, along with the pernicious practice of entombing dead bodies in fortresses of lead and cement, supposedly making the reanimation of their constituent parts more convenient for the Almighty. This defies both logic and nature, since we’re biologically constituted to become compost.

            Now that I’ve offended almost everyone, let me hasten to say that I appreciate the fact that religious beliefs about an afterlife have offered immeasurable comfort to generations of believers. Personally, I’m okay with not knowing what awaits me after I die, but I respect others’ right to believe anything they like, so long as they acknowledge that it is only a belief. Because there’s no getting around the fact that nobody knows what, if anything, happens to us after death except for the dead, and they’re keeping stubbornly mum. Anything we think we know about whether life on Earth is all there is can never be more than a belief or a hope.

            When he wasn’t traumatizing me for my own good, my father tried to instill the wisdom that it’s no good complaining about what can’t be changed (“Of course it’s hot! It’s the middle of summer! That’s what ice cubes are for, fer cryin’ out loud!”). My spiritual path is founded on somewhat the same philosophy, although my father might not have seen it that way. I choose to live in harmony with, and derive wisdom from, the observable facts of nature, and nature, as even the most desultory gardener can readily observe, decrees that death is not an enemy to be vanquished. In the natural order of things, death is not even merely the absence of life—it is what makes life possible. Every living thing on the planet, from humans to penguins to radishes, is composed of raw materials derived from other living things that have died and decomposed. Look under any rock and you can watch death being chewed, churned, and excreted into the stuff of new life. There is no food without death, no summer without winter, no room for new humans and animals unless some exit the scene to free up space and resources.

This is, as Lucretius wrote sometime before 55 BCE, the way things are. I recently read the only surviving work of this Roman poet, a 7,000-line poem outlining his philosophy, called “On the Nature of Things.” Lucretius didn’t believe that his fellow Romans needed to look to a pantheon of gods and goddesses to account for lightning, storms, harvests, wine, disease, reproduction, or death. He argues that these are all natural processes that can be understood by careful observation of the natural world. He’s particularly concerned that humans not live in constant fear of death, since it is the natural partner of life. He compares the process of one generation succeeding another to a relay race in which the runners willingly pass on the torch of life, and that our own deaths are the necessary condition for the constant renewal of the world. “The old must give way, pushed aside / By the new, and one thing by another thing is re-supplied.” His purpose, he writes, is to “toss that Dread of Death out on its ear / Since that’s what stirs the lives of mortals into such turmoil / From the very depths, and there is nothing that it does not soil / With the smirch of death, no pleasure, pure and clean it does not spoil.”

In December, as the year subsides into deep winter, the Earth itself seems in the throes of a kind of death. Days shorten, temperatures drop, the ground is strewn with withered leaves. The darkness and cold of winter can burden the human body and spirit, making us yearn for the return of the light. This longing is the origin of all Yule and Christmas celebrations, where candles, hearth fires, and holiday lights signal our joy, at the darkest point of the year, that the winter solstice marks the slow but inexorable return of the life-giving sun. I used to dread winter, but my perspective has begun to shift as I’ve tried to live mindfully with the rhythms of the year. I no longer think of winter as merely the absence of summer, but as a vital part of the cycle of life, a chance for living things to rest and conserve their resources. Instead of mourning the starkly barren trees, I imagine them as I am after a long day’s work—eager to strip off all my clothes. I imagine the winter trees stretching their bare limbs to the sky and sighing, “Aaah, that’s better.”

Perhaps now and then a particularly sensible penguin gives a fleeting thought for the morrow. Who can say? But there’s something uplifting about these creatures’ apparently serene acceptance of their essential penguin-ness. It gives me courage to face the inevitable fact that we’re all navigating the same River of Life, a river that, at its furthest reach, plunges over the edge of a cliff in a vast cataract. Early or late, all living things go over the edge, relinquishing their elements to the resourceful, nurturing Earth to be recycled. Until then, it seems only right that we should take some time to float on our backs and gaze at the stars, or slide down some ice on our bellies.

In the natural order of things, Lucretius wrote, “one thing rises from another—it will never cease. / No one is given life to own; we all hold but a lease.” Wise words from a man who, it’s a good bet, never laid eyes on a penguin.