Death

There are 38 posts tagged Death (this is page 2 of 2).

Ten thousand years from today

The wind blows today as it once did ten thousand years ago, yet we think about today and it feels special, unique, ours. We await the sunset each day with a sense of anticipation, placing importance on this particular day, on this particular cycle of experience, treating this one conscious moment as if it were ours to command, as if the center of the universe existed beneath our feet.

And perhaps it does, but can we imagine for just one moment the absolute insignificance of our existence?

Billions have come. Billions have gone. Billions more, holding just as much sense of self-importance, will come still, and then be forgotten. They will look at the wind just as I, and wonder just as I, and a few, for slightly longer than average, will be remembered, their thoughts re-thought, their words repeated, their actions reexamined; but they too will fade.

All that remains unchanged, untouched by the vastness of time, is change itself, the heartbeat of the universe, pulsating and breathing like giant creature full of stars and galaxies and universes.

And we? We exist in the belly of that beast, a crucial but unaccountable part of a larger organism, one of far greater scale and embodiment than our feeble imaginations are capable of comprehending.

We are like the billions of microbes living within each of us, unheard and unseen, their struggles in our digestive tract, their trials and tribulations, their pains and hard work, their concerns and worries and frustrations, all meaningless when we change the perspective to that which encompasses their existence.

Will our legacy be like theirs, one of symbiosis, one of attempting to coexist in harmony with its host? Will we search for meaning and seek to understand our place in the universe? Or will we quarrel, amongst ourselves and with ourselves, living out our lives unconscious and ungrateful for the crucial role we play in the fabric of the universe?

The pulse of the universe will go on, oblivious to our ballooned sense of superiority, unaffected by the insignificance of all that we consider of utmost importance. Our place will be replaced by others, some of whom will seek harmony, some of whom will ignore it, and yet others who stare at the wind marveling at its transparent embrace, ten thousand years from today.

Following Through

In martial arts, instructors teach us to punch and kick through our target. Instead of aiming for the bullseye on the kicking pad, we're told to aim for the area six inches behind it so that when our fist or foot comes into contact with the pad, we won't slow down or hold back our strength.

This lesson is especially important when learning to break bricks. If we don't drive through the area that appears to be the stopping point, the bricks won't break; our fist will.

In life, we need to aim for something beyond the stopping point of death. We need to aim for targets and goals that we cannot actually realize within our lifetimes but which through aiming for will ensure that our potential is fully realized.

If we go through life undervaluing our potential and holding back, our life will be filled with waypoints of disappointment and a sense of loss will accompany the passing of each easily achievable goal as we release it to continue moving forward.

If instead we set goals with the understanding that we're capable of so much more, then our short-term goals will feel more like meaningful steps along the path and the achievement of those goals will come with a sense of joy, fulfillment, and anticipation for what comes next.

Death is an easy target. It's a focus point that we can all assume we're headed towards, whether we aim for it or not. But that's no excuse for undervaluing our potential, setting short-sighted goals, or passing the buck to the next generation. Life shouldn't stop short of death, it should follow through it.

This Moment

Close encounters with death are the ultimate reminder that each day, each breath, is indeed a gift, a precious privilege that we must respect and protect, a reminder that each moment is an opportunity to express the qualities we are worthy and responsible for living, qualities of courage, curiosity, compassion, kindness, and creativity; qualities of strength, intelligence, peace, love, and humility.

This isn't an opportunity we can waste. It's not something we can put aside until we have more time. We must use this moment to live with zest, with vigor, and with veracious valor. We must use this moment to express what it means to be a living breathing human being. We must use this moment to live fearlessly responsible for life because the next reminder we get may not leave us with another moment.

A Gift from Yesterday

Today creates a world of its own, a world open to redefining what it means to be alive. It's unique from yesterday, not a point in time but rather a canvas stretching from here to the end of eternity, a giant etch-a-sketch wiped clean by the darkness and illuminated by the light of those souls who inspire, move, and motivate us to step forward.

Each day is a small evolution, a bundle of hope and joy waiting to unfold; a new opportunity, a blank slate, a fresh page, and a new chapter in life. But today is special. Today is special because today is a care package handed to us with the same love and compassion that a parent cradles a newborn baby.

Embrace yourself. Right now. It’s okay, no one is watching. Close your eyes and wrap your arms around yourself. Give yourself a big hug. Feel those hands on your back, warm, soft, and gentle. Melt into that embrace.

That person loves you more than anyone ever could. That person will be with you forever, even on your deathbed. That person loves you so much that you're being handed the best gift that has ever been given. The gift of today.

The Circle of Life

“I’m from Germany,” she said with a smile.

“I was seventeen when I got married and I went to visit the United States shortly after that."

The complexion on her face suddenly changed and her smile disappeared. "When I returned home a year later my husband went off to the Korean War.”

There was a pause and she seemed to hesitate with the next few words.

“He never came back.”

“I was a widow at eighteen… so young…” Her voice drifted off into the distance and I could see in her eyes that she was reliving a life that seemed so distant and so far away.

Rosie was in her mid-70s but her beautiful blue eyes and lively attitude made her seem twenty years younger. She sat alone during her lunch break, quietly staring out the window watching people come and go from the store where she worked.

I had been using the cafe in the store as my makeshift office and after making eye contact and exchanging smiles several times, we began striking up random conversations.

Spontaneously sharing deep thoughts about life and the lessons it teaches us, our conversations seemed like an odd interaction between two strangers who were separated by nearly forty years of life experience.

A few days later I went to my sisters' house to hang out with my brother-in-law and my one-year-old nephew. When night fell, we started a campfire in the backyard and brought my nephew out to see it.

In the darkness his face glowed orange and he smiled so big that his tiny teeth shown through. As if witnessing a never ending stream of magic, he looked up at his dad and pointed at the fire in awe.

I've sat around perhaps hundreds of campfires in my lifetime, but my nephew was experiencing one for the first time.

Over the course of his life, how many campfires will he sit around? Since the dawn of mankind, how many times has this process repeated itself?

Listening to Rosie tell her wartime stories had made me realize how much had occurred before I was even born. Now I was looking at my nephew and realizing the exact same thing, only this time I was the older one.

It’s easy to forget that our entire bodily existence is an infinitesimal moment in time, a single raindrop in the sea of eternity. We subconsciously focus on our little slice because it's so much easier to digest. It solidifies the reality around us and makes us feel in control.

But it's important to remember that many others have come before us and that may others will come after us. This greater perspective allows us to see what's real. It allows us to be aware of the precious time we have left and appreciate the things that are really important.

No matter how difficult our situation or how many challenges we may face, there's no point in wasting time soaking ourselves in depression. We all struggle and experience loss, but it's our attitude that determines how we live, not our circumstances.

Watching my nephew stare at that fire, I remembered Rosie's attitude and the important thoughts she left with me.

As if sensing the empathy I felt towards her story, she said in an insistent tone "But life is good!"

“My father-in-law, who I’ve seen perhaps only twice since the war, reconnected with me a few weeks ago. We talked for hours. For so many years we didn’t know each other and now we have so much in common and so many stories to share.”

Her beautiful smile returned. “It’s the circle of life. Everything changes, turns, and loops back around again."

Not afraid to die

On the flight to Florida yesterday, a strong storm rocked the airplane. The pilot aborted our landing twice as high winds pushed the plane sideways and lightning filled the sky. Looking out the window I realized that I wasn't afraid to die. I'm ready to go when the time comes because I've been living my life with awareness, following my instinct, my intuition, and my heart. With every step, no regret. I love my life.

Live Each Day To The Fullest

The following is a guest post by David Turner. He emailed this amazing story to me after watching my latest video, Contemplating Contentedness. David's story touched me in many ways, so I asked if he would allow me to share it with my readers here on the blog.

"We have but limited time in this life and we need to do everything in our power to make the most of it." ~ Raam Dev

Ain't that the truth.

Made a few posts here and there about an RIP to a co-worker. But never really shared.

We had a 76 year old guy cleaning our cars at the dealership. He started about 11 years ago after 30+ years at the local foundry. He came to Indiana from West Virginia (from the hills). His dad worked in coal mines. Denver was unique. Had and kept his true hillbilly accent. "You gots sumthin I can tak this tar of with?" Now cleaning cars, one would think black tar... but he was of course talking about tires.

The guys back in the shop loved to tease him. And he gave it right back at them. He'd walk the dealership singing songs, not words but noises followed sometimes by a "yeah man, yeah buddy". Someone would say something interesting to him and he would make a lil hand gun out of his fingers and make the gunshot noise followed by "yeah" or "yep" or "you can say that again".

He was a true friend to everyone he met. Never met a stranger that didn't become his friend in seconds. Of course he didn't remember half their names, but the folks he befriended remembered him for life. Continue reading →

The Passing of my Grandfather

My grandfather passed away in his sleep last Thursday at the age of seventy.

I clearly remember the very last time I saw him. It was three weeks prior to his passing. He shook my hand, as he always did, and asked how I was doing. I only saw him for a brief moment but now that moment is burned into my memory.

The days following his passing were noticeably, and understandably, tough on my mom, grandma, and my aunts and uncles. It was the first time I had seen many of my relatives cry. I was so impressed by my grandmothers strength. At one point, when she started crying into my shoulder, she held back and said "look at me, crying like a little child".

In life, choose happiness. Reserve your sadness for the afterlife.

A strange feeling arises every now and then when I realize he's gone. For that brief moment, it doesn't feel real. Everything, from the wake to the funeral, felt surreal. I couldn't help but contemplate how one day, myself and all the people present will meet the same fate. Life felt animated, a picturesque moment in a film without a known duration. Thirty years? Ten years? Five months? Three weeks? Six days? One hour?

My other grandfather, on my dad's side, died when I was about nine years old. I remember going to his wake and being surrounded by people in black suits towering over me, mourning for a reason I didn't understand and obviously feeling something I didn't feel. I really didn't know him that well and my only other memory of him is of when we visited him in the hospital.

You never know what moment may be the very last you'll see someone, so it's important to treat every moment as if it were your, or their, last. Living that way makes you appreciate every moment of life, regardless of the situation. When we take life for granted we forget who we really are and how much those we love mean to us.

Death gives us the ultimate reason to celebrate life.

A little over a week ago I wrote about how every single one of us will die one day and why that means we should all choose happiness and growth in life.

Almost every day I remind myself of this fact and each time I do I seem to appreciate life a little bit more. It reminds me that I have no reason to be unhappy; no reason to be angry; no reason to be frustrated; no reason to be unmotivated. It pushes me to take action and do the things I've always wanted to do. It reminds me to appreciate family, friends, and most of all, myself. It reminds me that, as my Uncle Dan always says, "your health is your wealth" and that all the money and fame in the world is pointless if I don't have my health.

"Your health is your wealth."

Take care of your health.

Choose Happiness and Growth

There are few things in life that are absolutely, one hundred percent, guaranteed. Death is one of those things. Take a moment to think about that. Every single one of us, no matter how smart, rich, or popular, every single one of us is going to die. The flesh and organic matter that is this body is guaranteed to one day cease to exist.

It's not just us either. Everything ends one day. Even this Earth will be gone, most likely consumed by the sun when it expands to a red giant billions of years from now. The entire universe, with all the planets, stars, and galaxies, will also be gone one day. And while it will probably happen a lot sooner, we can be certain that any memory of our existence will also gone when the universe goes.

The bottom line is this: You can be guaranteed that every single thing you see, think, do, or create, every single person you know or have heard of, every single place you’ve been or know about, will one day cease to exist.

So what does all this have to do with happiness? Well, if we can be assured that we’ll all die one day and that everything will eventually be gone, then it’s safe to assume that the only reason for existence is to experience life while it’s here.

So what’s life? Well, we know that death most often brings sadness and is associated with the ending of progression, so this would mean that life, being the polar opposite of death, should be associated with happiness and growth. I propose that choosing anything less than happiness and growth in our life is associating ourselves with death and thereby ignoring life.

This should give no one any reason to accept anything in life that constrains their own happiness or growth (whether mental, physical, or spiritual) or enables the constraint of others’ happiness or growth. To do either of these is to disregard, neglect, and eschew life itself.

Life is our chance. It’s our small window of opportunity. Our situations may vary and our circumstances may differ, but we all have the ability to make a conscious, day-to-day decision to strive for happiness over sadness; for growth over stagnation; for life over death.

Choose happiness. When something upsets you — the car in front of you cuts you off; you feel yourself getting agitated; someone is rude or unpleasant towards you; things just don’t seem to be going your way — make a conscious decision to let it go and choose happiness. Don't let your circumstances become an excuse not to be happy. You're alive right now. That's the only reason you need to be happy.

Choose growth. Do you feel as though you're a better version of yourself today than you were yesterday? If you don’t, then it's time to make a conscious decision to do something to improve yourself every single day. Stop watching so much TV. Stop oversleeping. Do something every day to improve your health (both mental and physical!). Small changes over a long period always equate to a greater overall change. As long as you're living, you should be growing. Stagnation is for death.

It’s your life! What will you do with it?

What is the Purpose of an Ending?

Everything has an ending, doesn't it? When we're talking about life and relationships, the ending often brings out many emotions. Opposite to the ending, the start and beginning are often associated with joy and happiness. Other endings and beginnings, however, are often not so defined.

When you're hungry, you feel a sense of gratification the minute you start eating. When you're on an airplane starting a 5-day vacation to a tropical island, you're happy and relaxed knowing the next few days will be enjoyable. When a baby is born, happiness is associated with the event. As the child grows up, all he is concerned with is how he will enjoy that day.

But when you finish eating and you're full, you quickly forget the gratification you felt minutes earlier. Your return trip home on the airplane is filled with only memories of the enjoyment you experienced, as you slowly adjust back into the thinking mode of daily life that you associate with grunt work. When the baby grows up, has kids and grand-kids of his own, he will lie on his deathbed where there is no happiness to be found. As the child grew older, he found less and less happiness from life. Continue reading →

Completed: 16.6% of my Life

If there's anything I've learned the older I've become, it's to never claim to know what the you of the future (even 1 year in the future) will say, do, think, or believe. I didn't expect or anticipate a single thing that's happen to me in the past two years and I have no idea, and refuse to make any assumptions of, where I will be in three, six, or even twelve months from now.

It's liberating to let go of all expectation and to live life as it comes at you—with a plan yes, but one that is pliable; one that you will allow to adjust and change on the fly.

It makes you feel invincible, as if each and every day is an entire lifetime, and that you have nothing to worry about besides what happens today.

What is age anyway? It's a number which we have created to define time—to catalog our existence on Earth. For that matter, if I lived on any other planet in this solar system, my age would not be 25 today.

Planet
My Age
Mercury
103.81
Venus
40.64
Earth
25.00
Mars
13.29
Jupiter
2.11
Saturn
0.85
Uranus
0.297
Neptune
0.152
Pluto
0.101

If my age can fluctuate so much just by the planet I reside on, then what age would I be living on other planets in other solar systems? The bottom line is, we create and define age. It's a measurement of time which has been globally accepted (I won't say universally accepted, because I highly doubt other universe's have agreed to anything). I talked more about time in a previous post, Timeless Living.

The human mind is a very powerful thing—so powerful in fact that I believe we assist nature in making us old by reminding ourselves of our age. We have this preconceived idea of how old we're expected to live—how many people truly believe, and I mean as much as they believe they will die without air, that they will live to 150 years old?

I don't tell myself I've turned 25. I tell myself I have turned 16.6. I cannot escape the usage of date and time during my day-to-day living and I cannot change what everyone has agreed upon as a measurement of time. So instead I've decided to change what I believe my age is: I'm only 16.6% through my life. When I die, and reach 100% of my worldly existence, I will be 150 years old.

The Observer

Yesterday, I was driving home from work in Boston to my parents house in New Hampshire. As I was pulling out of a side street, onto a major road, I looked to my right and saw no cars. I looked to my left and saw no cars. However to the left I was unable to see more than 50 feet down the road because the road went up and over a hill. So I looked quickly to my right once again to make sure it was clear and took my foot off the break petal. As the car started to roll forward and my foot moved from the break petal to the gas petal, some uncontrollable force jerked my foot back over to the break petal, for no apparent reason at all. As my head moved to look to the left, a car flew right in front of me, missing me by inches.

As I exited the side road, pictures of what could have just happen flashed through my head. I saw my car being smashed in the front, spinning around and hitting another oncoming car, and causing a pileup. All of this in a very dangerous location just over a hill, where cars normally travel 50mph. The pictures in my head were so realistic that it was as if all the physics needed to make a realistic recreation of what could have happen, had already been calculated. Is it possible that in an alternate reality my foot continued to press on the gas petal and I slammed into the oncoming car? Is it possible that the repercussions and effects of such a disaster were so strong and profound, that signals from the event were felt even in an alternate reality (mine), which somehow helped prevent me from making that alternate reality my own?

Ironically, when I arrived at my parents house a few minutes later, my dad put on a 2 hour science show about the quantum world, interestingly called "What The Bleep Do We Know?". It touched on so many controversial ideas and asked so many of the same questions that I have always asked myself for as long as I can remember, that I'm going to buy the DVD just to hear to them again. I've always felt a sort of disconnection from reality, an unreal, dream like feeling. Many argue that such a feeling isn't good because it prevents me from taking responsibility for my own actions or being receptive to the feelings of others. However, I believe that since I have felt this way my entire life I have been able to make the clear distinction between "this world" as everyone perceives it, and "the other world" that I feel I exist in. I can still live my life and respond to others as anyone else would, however I'm always aware that something else exists.

Masaru Emoto, a Japanese photographer, has shown with his photos that thought and emotion can affect the properties and shape of water molecules. If that's not proof enough that thought and emotion can directly have an impact on the world around us, then I don't know what is. There have been many unexplainable cases of patients miraculously being cured by their strong will to survive. Positive thoughts do more for us than strengthen our self-esteem. They strengthen our physical bodies and make our world a better place. I always observe myself whenever I'm in a difficult or stressful situation. Just observing yourself through a separate identity that isn't effected or touched by worldly problems, makes dealing with situations much easier. It puts problems into perspective, just like the photographer behind his camera always sees more than his camera ever could.

In the movie there is a story told about the Indians who were the first to see Columbus when he arrived in the New World. The Indians could not see Columbus's ships, even though they were anchored near land, because they had never before seen such a ship. The medicine men noticed ripples in the water around where the ships were anchored, so they knew something odd was happening. Only when the Indians put their trust and belief in what the medicine men were telling them, and when they genuinely believed, did they actually see that the ships existed. Whether this story is true or not, it does make you wonder: Is it possible for us to see something that our mind cannot imagine? We can imagine a rock floating in mid-air, so I suppose if someone had the power to make a rock float, we'd see it. We might not want to believe it, but our brain could certainly imagine it. Now suppose there's an alien spaceship, a spaceship like we've never seen before. It doesn't look like any spaceships we've seen in the movies or in a cartoon and it has no likeness to anything we've ever seen before. How could we see it? If we can't even imagine it, how could we possibly see it when it's right in front of us? Maybe that's why all the photographs of UFO's or eye-witness encounters have been so vague. We want to believe, so we see something, but we just don't know what to see. So thats what we see, something.