The Art of Dying
In the last year, I’ve had a few wake up moments like finding out about a friend diagnosed with MS, another one winning tuberculosis and moving away from a close someone, that shook me into wondering if I was happy with the life I had created and grapple with questions such as if I even knew what it was to live, and how.
In the middle of the transition from college to work and the ups and downs of finding a job, I had completely forgotten about my personal goals, or the projects I wanted to take up, or the kind of relationships I wanted to have. Most of my thoughts revolved around what I did not have, instead of counting on what I did.
Sometimes we lay out a certain life plan for ourselves, and in the zest of materialising that one blueprint of what we hope our life to be, we take for granted the simple things we have in abundance. Instead of recognising the power of the moment, excessive planning and retrospection take over. For instance, only when we lose someone, or a friend has shifted to another city, does it strike us how little time we get. One of the first few thoughts I’ve experienced when someone moved away, was I there enough? Did they know how much I cared? We often fail to recognise that things might change, even though it is the most redundantly founded truth in nature.
I wonder then, with all the unpredictability life has to offer, what is a life well lived?
And it got me to thinking how life made more sense to me in reverse. Thinking of how to live, makes it seem as though we have forever, but the thought of death or separation puts things into a lot more perspective. Life feels so short then, as though I had lived only fleeting seconds of moments worth remembering.
If we looked at our life in terms of how little we had to live, perhaps we wouldn’t leave sight of the things that mattered, like the people we loved or the crazy exhilarating things that were on our list. And that one moment when it really would hit you, you’d realize how transient a life we lived. Things would seem so simple even in the most messed up situations for those split seconds.
“Everyone knows they’re going to die,’ he said again, ‘but nobody believes it. If we did, we would do things differently.”
In essence, I think and as Morrie said, if I learned how to die, I might end up learning how to live.
