Death

You must die everyday. In your mind, you must die everyday. Everyday you must meditate on death, until it brings a smile to your face. Right now, you know you’re going to die, you know everyone is going to die, but you don’t know death itself. You know it superficially, you know it’s full of unknowns and finality that look scary and bad to you. You also know it is inevitable, yet continually try your hardest to avoid contemplating it. You must stop turning away and instead stare death right back in the face. He’s looking at you, any possible moment. Unless you decide to confront death now, it’s guaranteed he’s going to surprise you at some moment in time. And you won’t be ready. And it won’t be pretty, the unknown putting you in a vise grip of fear. But there is a far bigger travesty here. Fearing the unknown of death means you cannot dance freely with life. By ignoring death, you effectively function as if you’re going to live here forever, which keeps you from truly experiencing the miracle that is life. No moment is all that special when you have eternity, yes? However, if you choose to genuinely understand the nature of your mortality, in an instant, the whole of existence will open up to you. You will be ready to die at any moment, so that you are fully alive every moment. Death will claim your body and your mind. But if you know from your life experience that you are not your body or your mind, then death is just another experience, the body and mind now absent, and death will become a welcomed presence. In this sense, you are no longer battling to evade death, but rather stepping into a new adventure with life. Death is neither good nor bad, friend nor foe. You must embrace death as an unknown aspect of life in order to discover an experience that delivers life in all its fullness. This you must do.