Be true to yourself and follow your heart, everything else is secondary
How contemplating our death can help us focus on important stuff
Death is not as bad as we think, it’s a good reality
Amazingly, we humans take our life for granted until we don’t or worse, we can’t. While some of us don’t take it granted once we realize that our time is pretty short in this world, but others run out of this short time before they could take out part of it to think about its scarcity. When was the last time we took a step back from our chaotic life and showed gratitude for being alive? We start our days either being anxious by our life’s problems or frustrated at yesterday’s brutalities while neglecting the miracle happening with every rising sun, we wake up out of our unconsciousness. We never ask, why shouldn’t our bodies had given up on our self in the night considering that many of us never bother to take care of them.
Around a decade ago, I heard a commencement by the late Steve Jobs in which he told three stories and one of the stories was about death. In this story, he mentioned a quote which made an impression on him at the age of 17 and since then it has made an impression on me as well,
“If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.”
This was the first time I got to think about death and my mortality. Living the better part of the decade knowing this, I believed to understand the life’s mysteries and truths, I thought that I had realized the life’s limitations and got my shit together, and to some extent, it did give direction to my life. However, I still often forgot this lesson as much as many of us and messed up my life in the most fashionable manner possible.
I knew the intellectual concept of death, but I forgot it as a reality, until recently when I had to put an effort for every breath to keep my dying conscious alive. I realized the life preciousness when I could not breathe anymore when I experienced tightness of chest, shortness of breath and chocking for ninety minutes, when I wanted to give up on myself, only if I knew that giving up is not giving up on life itself. All this time, I took knowing for realizing when they are two quite different things. We often know what is right or wrong, but we get to realize it when it intersects with our radius of reality and suddenly becomes all real. A smoker reads that smoking cause heart strokes, but he doesn’t stop until he has a minor stroke. Knowledge itself is not power until we can think that knowledge is as real in our life as it is on paper.
There is no denying that life in the 21st century is chaotic and overwhelming, and to add the fact that even this is going to end one day doesn’t help much with the motivation to live. However, just like anything it can be a glass half full or half empty. Every morning, I get to be grateful about being alive and I find it to be a fantastic way to start my day. Every night, I ask myself, “if today was my last day, would I be happy to spend it like this?”, and this has given me the clarity to do find the meaning in life’s chaos.
Death is something that we all know deep down inside us to be inevitable but still, we don’t ever talk about it in our society. Dying is a unique taboo thing to talk or think about because all of us will do so sometime in future. Many of us think of death as a scary singular event happening in a far future, but it can’t be far from the truth. Death is a continuous work in progress starting as soon as we are born in the form of biological ageing.
What do we even mean when we say that there is a life-saving medicine invented? There is no lifesaving, there is just delaying of death. Life is not a stopwatch; it is a countdown timer. Death is the only thing which brings any value to being alive. If we never had to die, would being alive be the same thing? Objectively time and life are not finite resources, but death is the only factor that brings scarcity to our subjective lives.
Life is not a stopwatch; it is a countdown timer.
For more than a year, I have been eating healthy whole foods, losing weight, lifting weights, resistance training, meditating, journaling, fasting, and taking cold showers. I am the guy who tries to be the pinnacle of a healthy lifestyle and I never thought that I would be falling sick to the point that my body would’ve felt like giving up on me. Even I wasn’t off the hook and out of nowhere I developed a bacterial infection in my digestive tracts meddling with my immune system, hormonal balance, sleep cycle and every other bodily function take we many of us take for granted. Six weeks of living in this hell and I realized that no matter how much I can take care of my health, there are so many factors in play that one way or another, everyone is prone to death, anytime. The current coronavirus crisis makes it more real than ever.
I am the guy who tries to be the pinnacle of a healthy lifestyle and I never thought that I would be falling sick to the point that my body would’ve felt like giving up on me. Even I wasn’t off the hook
Despite, we live our life like immortals and never get to think about our mortality as it’s a sad reality to think about. We never talk about death and think there’s always going to be time, time to make arrangements, to make it up to our loved ones, to ask for forgiveness’s, to follow our ambitions, to live a life true to ourselves. It removes the floor of certainty beneath our feet and makes us find something more meaningful to stand on, something we genuinely believe in.
Realizing we are going to die one day makes us rethink our purpose on earth or simply put, it makes us cut the crap of our lives. It let us kill those dying parts of our life that we are just clinging on to for the wrong reasons, for the reasons that are not ours anymore. It’s a cold hard truth which no one can deny and as soon as one makes peace with it, it can be the shining light to direct one’s life.
Everything turned out to be useless at the moment when I had to force every shred of my willpower to keep delivering oxygen to my brain; to the dying consciousness of myself, which was just barely telling me not to give up, not to give up on my life goals, my family, my responsibilities, my aspirations. Something such as breathing that most of us take for granted became the only thing that mattered to me in those ninety minutes.
Three years back, I left comfort of my home and family in Pakistan and moved to Australia to live on my terms and experience the hardships of life. In those ninety minutes, when I was all alone without a single person there on my side, I had to ask myself is this truly what I wanted all along. That was the time when I got to think about all those unsaid words, undone things, unseen places, unexplored territories which I always wanted myself to indulge in but for one reason or another, I never did.
The words of Steve Jobs became real to me saying, “all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure — these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.”
“This was the closest I’ve been to facing death, and I hope it’s the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept.”
“No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be because death is very likely the single best invention of life. It is life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now, the new might be you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.”
“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your inner voice. And most important, dare to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.” I wish I could’ve done a better job rephrasing these words of Steve Jobs and made them mine but this is true and it cannot be mine even when I believe it to be true and am trying to say them myself. Knowing I would not be able to do justice to it, I will leave it as the genius of Apple intended it to be.
Acknowledging our death shouldn’t be such a bitter process as it is an integral part of the organic ecosystem of the world. It’s the life’s change agent which clears the old to make way for the new. Every 10 minutes, 10 million of our cells die so that new and better ones are born. Seventy per cent of the house dust consists of our dead skin and bacteria dying to make way for the new. On an organismic level, it’s a constant chain of organisms dying to become food for the stronger in the food chain.
It is needed for the progress on which the world has evolved and just because we may not like this evolution coming based on our lives doesn’t mean it’s a lie. We celebrate the start of all the new phases of our life in the form of birthdays and I have nothing against it, hell I am always grateful to make it another day. However, isn’t it also the death of a version of oneself, the one we have lived and cannot ever relive again, aren’t we one step closer to hitting the brakes?
There are very few moments in one’s life which can alter your perception of life and hopefully this would be one of those moments for me. For a long time, I have been thinking about doing things that I truly believed deep in my heart, saying what I believed to be true, doing what I believed to be meaningful but the fear of making a fool out of myself, being wrong, falling on my face, losing the people I once called friends who beg to differ from my true self has kept me paralyzed to take any action and waiting for that perfect moment that never arrived.
For the last 5 or so years, I kept working on myself, my ideas, my knowledge, my philosophy but I have been an introvert about that side of myself. I have been shying away from sharing it to others because I know that there is still so much that I don’t know, but I guess that’s always going to be the case and as Socrates said, “I am the wisest man alive for I know one thing and that is that I know nothing”.
After this experience, I realized that all that thirst for learning and knowledge I had since my childhood would just go in vain if no one ever benefited from it. Spreading what I know is the way to go about it and tell the truth I believe or let the people challenge it if its wrong. I can define meaning and success for myself. From this day moving forward, I am going to be an active node in the network of humanity and provide my feedback about the things that I believe to be true.
Thanks for reading Writers Guild — A Penname publication
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