Death is one of the most common shared experiences in the human condition, and yet we spend most of our lives avoiding it. It usually doesn’t hit us until we experience the death of a loved one or pet. Then it cuts deep. If we let it.
And depending on our capacity for grief, we might still avoid it.
Whether or not we want to admit it or not, everyone around us will die, including us. And we don’t know when. Which makes it even more of a tough pill to swallow.
Lately, it’s evident that everyone (including me) is trying to optimize their life to some extent in order to live longer and prolong death. Eat healthy, move our bodies, take all the supplements, connect with others. We do all the things so we can avoid death, or at least delay it. And maybe we can have a bangin’ body, feel better, and present well to the world in the process.
But it got me thinking; are we more scared of dying or actually living?
We got so used to avoiding death because of the obvious torture of the last 7 years…the pandemic, wars, injustice, inflation…all keeping us in survival mode. There has been an existential threat at every corner of the world and in our lives. And this isn’t just the external world. What has this done to our internal world?
The real question is not whether we're scared of dying so much as have we lost our ability to really live.
I’ve had to self-reflect on this recently as I’m helping people explore this question further while also exploring it within myself. What I’ve learned in the process is that asking deeper questions can help us understand our relationship to living fully.
What actually makes us come alive? What activities bring out our aliveness? And who around us is expressing the same aliveness, where their energy has become contagious to us?
These questions allow us the opportunity to fully understand how we want to live in the world, in our bodies, and within relationships.
Then our focus on living fully can feel like a more useful endeavour than prolonging our death.