The inevitability of dying can be the ultimate motivator for living… By embracing your mortality, you can live a life worth immortality.
“An awareness of one’s mortality can lead you to wake up and live an authentic, meaningful life.” -Bernie Siegel
Being self-aware we have by default the basic will to live; when hungry we seek food and when in danger we run or fight, instinctively – no different than an animal.
But also as sentient beings, we don’t just want to survive and stay alive, we want to thrive and feel alive.
We simply have more to live for, more motivation to do more with our existence. If love, fortune, pleasure, fame and power defines the human experience, then mortality defines the human condition.
No matter how much love you reciprocate, fortune you amass, pleasure you feel, fame you reach or power you obtain, you cannot escape your mortality.
This is why we live our lives acting on one or more of those human experiences as much as humanly possible. Because we are human and we know death can sometimes come abruptly but always certainly.
Religion aside, let’s say death is the end of our existence, or more precisely the end of a conscious mind. So no heaven, hell, reincarnation or afterlife, just ultimate finality. I think that’s as terrifying as it is beautiful.
It makes our blip of an existence mean something and not just a way station to a “better place”.
A conclusion to a story.
Accepting your own mortality and letting it motivate you can be the difference of that story being a poetic, generic, pathetic, esthetic or epic one.
Nothing is forever, not this Earth we live on nor the Sun that gives it life and not even the Universe.
While the Universe has far more days left than there are words in the entirety of the internet, its fate is mortal like everything else.
It all comes down to how much time we get and the average human reading has less days to live than all the characters on this single page, not the entire site but this one page.
Don’t live or act like there’s no tomorrow, but as if there’s only a few of them left and more are simply not available. As well as planning to get the most out of those future days, not just the immediate ones.
“Longevity without substance is meaningless continuity.” -John V Cain
By the numbers we only get 30,000 days of existence. The first 1000 we can’t even remember, 5000 for our childhood, 2000 for our teens, 3000 for our prime and so on. But that’s not calculating the variables of premature death, injury and sickness.
Those numbers, while statistically grim, should inspire you to live an inspiring life. Taking comfort in accepting what you can’t control and creating your own fate.
Gain immortality by living a life worth imitating.
[The featured photo was taken while riding a zip line across Seneca Island in Singapore.]
5 Comments
I miss these posts, thank you.
You got some very quotable lines up in there, very inspirational.
This was a chilling article. Almost scary if you think about it. But it makes sense, how death makes us want to live. And like the Special Zero said, become immportal by living a life worth copying, I see what you did there. I like that.