You will die soon.
I once again find myself confronted by the notion that existence is merely an impossibly brief intermission between two infinitely consuming periods of non-existence. Time, as it relates to individual experience, can be divided into three distinct categories: pre-you, you, and post-you.
Being presently fully immersed in the “me” phase of this process, I cannot help but spend some time now and again attempting to reach a few conclusions regarding how best to spend my brief window of cognition and choice. If I’m lucky, I will have this brain and the body over which it presides for another 60-80 years. It is my hope, if not my expectation, that I will be afforded the right to decide how to use it. Then, one day, it will come to be that the will I have over my life will extinguish, that my organic material will be returned to the universal process from which it came, thus ushering in the infinity of “post-me”.
When faced with the truth of resource scarcity, it is only natural that we begin to think about the resource, or the potential lack of it, in a vastly different way. We know from personal experience and through observation of others that the perception of abundance is most often a precursor of wastefulness and thoughtlessness. We need not look any further than the prodigality of wealthy western nations for empirical evidence of this fact. Simply put, in the absence of a direct threat to abundance, it is highly unlikely that the true value of a resource will be understood.
It is for this reason that I find worth in the process of thinking about death in personal and imminent terms. You will die, and relatively soon. You. Soon. When we take a few minutes to really let it sink in, to let it imbed in our thoughts, maybe even scare the hell out of us, we open ourselves to an honest exploration of the most important question a human being can ask:
Are we living well?
I am not religious, and it would be quite a stretch to say that I have faith in any form of afterlife, but I do very much like the idea of reflecting on a life once it has ended; then, having done so, getting the chance to live it over again. While I certainly do not believe in the reality of such a concept, I like it just the same, and I find it to be a valuable thought exercise.
So there we are, recently dead, watching a playback of our lives. We re-experience it all, minute by minute, from a purely disengaged vantage point. When the reel runs out, we are born again into a do-over, equipped with the years of wisdom gained from our first faltering attempt.
I refuse to believe there is a single person out there who wouldn’t choose to live differently the second time around. And yet, what I find most peculiar, is that we don’t have to die to experience a re-birth. The changes that we most need to make can be made in this lifetime, and at any juncture of our choosing. That we so often fail to recognize this shot at self-correction is one of the great mysteries of our uniquely intelligent, yet remarkably ignorant, species.
We are all free to believe what we will about the nature of death, and what exactly happens afterwards. However, that said, it is not necessary for our concept of redemption to hinge on faith or religion. Redemption is right in front of us, everywhere and all the time.
The people we want to be, the people we would be if we could do it all over again, are waiting patiently to be called upon.
To a certain degree, we are all wasting our lives. I know what I could be doing differently, and you probably do too. The simple and profound truth is that our opportunity to change is ephemeral and ever-diminishing. Nobody can say beyond conjecture whether we will have a second or third chance at this, but we can all come to realize the following:
We do have at least one chance at getting it right, and that chance is today, standing immediately before us.
