Let Death Be Your Constant Companion

Don’t just come to grips with death. Allow it to guide you toward a good life, and make it a partner on your journey.

I drive fifty minutes to work every day, and fifty minutes back home. Most of that time, I’m either dealing with big-rigs on a two-lane country road, or I’m dealing with big-rigs on a busy highway. At any given moment, any single distraction — mine or someone else’s, caused by anything at all — could initiate a series of misfortunes that I wouldn’t be able to avoid, and … well, that would be that.

One hundred minutes of nearly every day of my life, I am literally inches away from death. Cumulatively, that’s more than eight hours of every week spent on the knife’s edge. More than four hundred hours every year on death’s doorstep.

But of course, humans can get used to anything. After a while, these quietly death-defying moments become pretty mundane. It’s almost like we need a close call every once in a while, just to shake ourselves back to awareness.

We see death routinely in our escapist entertainment — every show or movie or news report seems to pivot around death — but in our real lives, death has become almost entirely invisible. When a relative or a pet passes away, it’s often behind closed doors. When I’m…