The Gift

“Every life comes with a death sentence,” says Walter White in Breaking Bad.

True enough, mortality is perhaps the one sure thing in life. Depending on how you look at it, mortality can be a curse, or it can be a gift.

Many of us live our lives fearing the day we die — or, at least woeing how it actually happens. Survival, after all, is a basic part of human nature. However, it is also part of human nature to one day pass away from this existence.

I would like to believe that death — or, rather, the knowledge and acceptance of one’s mortality — is a gift rather than a curse. This knowledge pushes me to want to squeeze out more out of life, to live every day in gratitude and appreciation, as if it were my last. Knowing I would be gone someday should be an inspiration to do things that matter, to build relationships hat have meaning, and to have a positive impact on people.

Sadly, many people trudge through life aimlessly and seemingly without meaning. It’s even sadder that I often feel I am living life in auto-pilot, going through the motions without any thought, neck-deep in the drudgery of everyday minutiae.

The seemingly endless distractions, problems, hurdles and bottlenecks keep me from truly being alive, mindful and appreciative.

One soundtrack that has haunted me since my youth is Queen’s Who Wants to Live Forever, which appeared on the Highlander film and TV series in the 1980s and 1990s. In that particular universe, immortals roamed the world, facing each other off, until eventually there is only one left.

For most of their unnaturally long lives, the immortals would watch their loved ones grow old and die, as they themselves retain their youth and vigor over hundreds or thousands of years, only to keep on moving to protect their identities, in the proces gaining — and losing — loved ones anew.

Who wants to live forever, indeed, if, in your immortality, everything you hold dear would pass in the blink of an eye?

In J.R.R. Tolkien’s literary universe, mortality is also a big part of the Gift of Men — although the concept had changed through time. In its original incarnation, the gift was freely accepted by Men when their time had come, and in some cases Men were able to choose when to accept the gift, as in the case of Aragorn and others of Numenorian descent.

Of course the bigger interpretation of the Gift in this regard is how we move on to a different existence, with our souls living beyond the confines of this mortal life. The direction in which the lives of our immortal souls would go in the aftermath of our mortal death would, of course, depend on the course we plot during our lifetime. So let’s make it matter.