There’s a certain vanity that comes with being alive. We feel ourselves better than all who have come before us. We do have one major advantage over them: ALIVE. It’s easy to ignore the fact of death in our daily lives, and yet it looms over us. Any moment could be the last. This fact tickles me because I know what a blessing it is—even if I forget sometimes.
Ignoring the fact of death is ignorance of the one and only fact of life. To further describe a stark picture of reality, we arrive naked and alone, we leave naked and alone, and any idea to the contrary is mistaken. We spend time with others, we use different possessions, but it’s all temporary. Life is temporary, and every aspect of it is temporary.
All the vanity of the living cannot soften the mighty blow: we will die. Resistance, ignorance, or distraction from the situation doesn’t change the fact. We can’t know when or how, but there is no “if.” We have no control over the fact of death. And therein lies a powerful practice: to allow that which cannot be controlled, and develop control over the self in this moment. There is only this moment. Death teaches us that.
There is liberation in coming to comfortable terms with the situation. If death casts a constant dark cloud over life, basking in the sunshine is freedom. The fact of death, once acknowledged, mandates that we treasure this breath, cultivate this moment, and awaken to this one and only life experience on planet earth.
Every moment could be the last. I pretend it is. I imagine my lifeless pile of bones, bleached by the sun—my breath, just the wind that causes the ribs to rise and fall. I often play that this is my last moment, so how could I make it the most comfortable and easy? How can I be more attentive to it? How can I improve my experience of it?
If there is no other moment, why not enter this one fully? In it, we can practice being a blessing to our lives and to our deaths, without the burden of fearing reality.
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