On death and happiness
Happy International Day of Happiness! Just a reminder, we’re all going to die.
You can stop reading now and I wouldn’t blame you. Death isn’t something we normally want to casually think about on a random Sunday.
My first instinct was to skip ahead when I saw the newest Radio Headspace episode pop up in my Stitcher queue. The topic was life and death.
[I’m listening to 100 different podcasts and writing what I learn. This is No. 28 in my 100 podcast series.]
Something made me stick with it, and I’m glad I did. It’s not as morbid as it sounds. In fact, it was uplifting.
Radio Headspace is the podcast companion to the Headspace meditation app. Podcast host Georgie Okell interviews experts on all sorts of topics related to mindfulness, including fear, stress, creativity, community, reconnection and much more.
This episode, No. 56 in the series, featured a neuroscientist, a hostess of a “Death Cafe” and people who faced their own imminent death or the sudden loss of someone close.
One person’s account of surviving a liver transplant struck me the most. He said before his diagnosis, he stopped seeing “the tops of trees.”
In other words, he was looking down and straight ahead. He stopped looking up and noticing the grandeur of his surroundings. He stopped seeing the inspirational and aspirational.
The paradox is that he had to be given a death sentence for that to change.
But he survived, and he said his biggest regret is that every day he falls back into a regular everyday routine. It takes a jolt — a visitation from death — to reminds us that we’re still going to die.
We don’t have a choice in this matter. Death is the ending we all know is inevitable.
But when we forget that, we stop really living our lives.
