Death is My Life

[ornoth]

While listening to one of the Zencast Dharma talks on the way to work this morning, Vipassana teacher Gil Fronsdal made an interesting assertion: that the wisdom we usually associate with our elders might not be a result of a wealth of worldly experience, as most people assume. Instead, he posited that such wisdom comes from close proximity to death.

Think about it. There are comparatively young people who have had near-death experiences which have forced them to confront their own mortality. Almost invariably, they come out of those experiences transformed, with a tremendous new appreciation for the preciousness of the brief time we each have on this Earth.

Now, “proximity to death” doesn’t necessarily mean that someone has to come close to dying. The loss of one or more loved ones might cause one to reflect on how one lives one’s own life. What’s important isn’t one’s age or that one has had a near-death experience; this transformation happens when an individual openly contemplates their own death, sincerely accepts and internalizes their impermanence, and lets an omnipresent knowledge of their own mortality inform the decisions they make.

I’m always surprised when people say they find that kind of orientation morbid or depressing. It’s only morbid if you haven’t accepted the fact that you are going to die. Might be seventy years from now. Might be next week. But it also could happen before you finish reading this article. Living your life denying that it’s going to end someday just doesn’t seem the path of wisdom to me. Someone who lives like that will suddenly find themselves on their deathbed, wishing they’d done things they haven’t done, and wishing they’d said things to people that they’ve always left unsaid. In short, ignoring your mortality is a surefire way to end your life full of regrets.

At the other end of the scale, accepting your mortality doesn’t mean living in constant fear. Wisdom is about accepting that it can happen, and will happen one of these days. That knowledge gives you the impetus to find a way to do those things you really want to do and tell people the things you really want to tell them.

If you’ll forgive the horrible linguistic coincidence, it’s like the gentle pressure of having a deadline. If there are things you want to do “someday”, it’s more likely you’ll do them if you know there’s a deadline than if you can put them off eternally. And no matter how much you might wish otherwise, death will not be put off eternally.

That’s the real revelation here. Accepting the grim fact that our lives are ephemeral doesn’t make you depressive and fearful; instead, the knowledge of death liberates you. It encourages you to get the most out of each day and each relationship, and it prompts you to clean up your “stuff” with the other people in your life. That way, when you do reach your deathbed, you can be satisfied that you lived your life well and have left nothing undone or unsaid and—most importantly—with nothing to regret.

Ironically, this belief is something I’ve held for a long time. Whenever possible, I have tried to make decisions based on the criterion of which choice I would regret more, when viewed from the perspective of my deathbed. Somehow I stumbled onto that piece of wisdom years and years ago, and it has really served me extremely well. It’s very heartening to hear a Buddhist teacher sanction the same basic concept: that wisdom comes from proximity to death.

I can’t say whether it’s a philosophy that will work for you, but I offer it here for your consideration. I would be delighted if it helped you get more enjoyment and contentment out of your life. After all, as they say, you only go around once.

Comments

you said what I have been thinking

[jtroutman.livejournal.com]

Very insightful, well written, and I agree. I have been coming around to this point of view over the last 5 years. The close proximity of death (my daughter) was in fact much of the trigger.

We always tend to regret the things we do NOT do more than the things we do.