Living Life Well Despite the Inevitability of Death
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No one lives forever. This is an unalterable fact that all adults understand. However, how many times a day do you sit and think about how your life will end? Once, twice, never?
In this piece, we shall explore how balancing the knowledge that our lives will end with choosing to live well despite that knowledge equals a life well-lived.
Learning that Life Is Not Forever
In modern times, when humans are children, we do not understand how tenuous living is believing that nothing will end our existence. The belief that we will go on forever is adaptive as if we spent an enormous amount of time thinking of our deaths, we could not enjoy life to the fullest. We would forever be worried that anything we do may lead to our demise.
As children, we lost a pet or a grandparent teaching us that things and people do die. However, within ourselves, we allow the delusion that death “will never happen to me” reign.
Still, we have learned that life does not go on forever and although we try to avoid thinking about our own death, it is inevitable that we think about it.
Through the death of a pet or loved one, we have learned that life is not forever and that those left behind when we die. grieve.
The Completeness of Death
As humans age, we learn that death is not something that happens halfway. When a person dies, they are not partially dead, they are completely and irrevocably dead. For some this completeness is startling and unwanted.
Part of every human wants to believe that one can die and still return to watch over our relatives and friends. Whole religions build on the premise that one can die and return later. We have invented heaven, hell, and many other terms to describe escaping the inevitable end of our days because we fear not being alive.
Somewhere deep inside every human is the desperate need to never die but to continue in some way. Even Dante’s version of hell, embraced by many Christians as the end for…
