YOLO

A reflection on life, death, and change

When I face a new challenge in my life, I always think about what a good friend of mine, Shiva Rajaraman, once said:

“If I make the wrong decision, that’s ok…I’ve made them all my life and if I make the right one, I’ll never know it. So just enjoy the ride, slippity slide.”

Shiva’s right. We’ll never know if we made the wrong decision. We never even know if we made the right decision. As Sartre says, we are our choices. However, this also means that we’re constantly taking risks.

Let me preface this essay by saying that I am agnostic and was raised without a religious belief system. This is why I have a hard time when people use the line “everything happens for a reason” as a message of comfort in times of strife. I don’t believe in a spiritual being controlling events in this world. I am not critical of people who do believe this; but I am intolerant of people who use religion to justify discrimination, inequality, hate, or violence.

Sometimes it can be really hard not believing in a God or higher power — like knowing there is something else beyond our physical bodies. I can only imagine that unwavering sense of comfort. Life would be oh so much easier if you really knew that everything was meant to be!

Growing up without religion definitely was a unique thing in my community. I can’t say it for sure but perhaps it’s why my sister became drawn to science and I became enamored with psychology. For fun, at 16 years old, I took a community college night class called Psychology of Modern Life. This changed everything. My anxious teenage mind was blown and my whole outlook on life changed. I had an awakening. I learned about a cognitive behavioral concept that I think of and act on regularly. This concept is a shiny, happy, magical perspective shift called death awareness.

The overall message of death awareness is that it’s healthy and beneficial to think to a moderate extent about one’s own mortality and the fragility of life from time to time in order to achieve perspective. I’ve found this helpful throughout the years when I have a hard time burying a grudge or moving past a small anxiety. This perspective seems like an obvious part of life, but I have noticed that many of us live our lives as if we were immortal. Ignorance may be blissful, but this lack of consideration of the fragility of life can be a detriment to your feelings about your day to day existence. I know the idea of a death awareness sounds quite bleak on the offset, but I always perceived it as a positive reset button when I’ve felt down in the dumps. Thinking about the end helps me to not sweat the small stuff and to focus on to the positive moments instead of dwelling on the bumps in the road.

Most of us have lost a loved one who had so much life left to live and this loss can be something that is extremely difficult to come to terms with or even put into perspective. Sometimes the pain is so unbearable that your brain can hardly keep up with the events of life. When this stuff happens, you’re lucky if you believe in fate.

A few years ago, my sister called me while I was at work to tell me that our longtime babysitter and role model, Wendy, died accidentally from a fatal, accidental mixture of medication. I immediately went into a state of disbelief and denial. The walls of the conference rooms closed in on me. Wendy was only 37 — how could have this happened to someone so young and vibrant? I couldn’t imagine a world without Wendy and could only think of all the wonderful things she brought to my life. How I wished I had told her more what an impact she had on me. I didn’t want to believe it and it hit me like a ton of bricks. Wendy was our caretaker, mentor, confidante, and then became our friend as we grew into adulthood. Even though it’s been years since she’s been with us, I can still hear her voice and laugh in my head when I think of her.

After the shock of her passing, I found myself getting through the sadness but moving into a phase I didn’t recognize. Things started to get weird as I couldn’t stop thinking about mortality.

I was having a bonafide existential crisis.

For weeks after hearing the news of Wendy’s passing, every moment of the day, I had to keep my mind from circling with thoughts around the peculiarity of life and death. I became obsessed with the concept of the afterlife and wished my parents raised me with a religion that believed in one, or any religion that believed we were put here by an actual God. I desperately wanted to know there was a point to all of this pain. I was envious of people who were certain there was a Heaven. I began Googling near death experiences in order to give myself hope there was more after this material world. I even started thinking about how selfish having children is — creating life for it just to end. I know, dark stuff…

I asked my non-religious father how he was able to lose so many friends and family members and move on as if nothing changed. He didn’t really have an answer — he just moved on — it was something he couldn’t control so he had to accept it. He said his usual “be here now” and told me it would pass. I couldn’t internalize this notion for quite a while and was freaked out that I would never stop fixating on mortality and the inevitability of the end. My moderate death awareness turned into all consuming death obsession spiral.

Eventually, as my dad predicted, it just stopped. I was able to get through a day without obsessing about the idea of why we’re here. I don’t know how I was able to reclaim control over my neuroses, but eventually the existential dread had subsided.

I’ve never really shared this experience in depth with anyone. It was weird, really weird — the feeling of losing my mind, losing control of my thoughts and going to such dark places. But what I learned is that I needed to slow down and realize that I only, truly had one life to live and I needed to live it to its fullest. Our lost loved ones would also want this from us. Sitting around dwelling on pain and anxieties could only hold me back. Also, spending so much time worrying about things out of my control became completely futile. Those were not the things I would care about lying on my death bed. You must live a life without regrets and even if it means you might fall down from time to time, who cares? You’re never going to have a second chance.

I get a lot of judgement for moving around as much as I do, but you know what? If I have the opportunity and the means, I am going to chase that happiness and dream. Every now and then I check in with myself and think — if everything ended tomorrow, would I be happy with my life so far? The answer is always yes because I took the risks and chances that felt right even if they were tricky or uncomfortable. Life can be unpredictable, chaotic, and tragic and instead of dwelling on the what-ifs, just follow your heart and embrace the unknown. Because as the great Bob Dylan once said, “he who isn’t busy being born, is busy dying.”