How death reminds us to live
Sad story, someone I worked beside is dying. Like, they are within days of such an end and barely 60 years on this earth to have lived.
Sad story, someone I worked beside is dying. Like, they are within days of such an end and barely 60 years on this earth to have lived.
It’s awful and heartbreaking…it’s the worst and most intense reminder to live that we have on this earth besides our own near-death experiences.
Why does death remind us of the joys of life?
I think it tends to do this because we so easily forget (yes, we do) that we aren’t promised the next day or the next hour. We could get in an accident on our way home from work or while he go to grab coffee with a friend.
Life is so finite and we are so blind to this reality most days.
When we are confronted by the death of someone we know and even just someone we know of say like a celebrity. Death is placed directly in front of our view.
It screams
“Here I am!”
And with that scream we are reminded….life is here in front of us. How long we keep it isn’t all up to us but what we make of it now is.
Take the saying
“stop to smell the roses”
It’s probably something you think of when something sad or bad happens in life. How fast it can all go.
So we stop, we observe.
And we often get back on the grind in many cases unless that death was very close to your heart, pretty quickly.
What can we do?
Well, we can slow our rolls a bit when these things come up for starters.
There is something to be said for reflection. In taking a look at what we are doing, what we like, what we love, and what we want to change.
These are unprecedented reminders in life that often just hit you and we so often see them, get sad and then let them roll off our backs because…
Life is still happening
I get it, life doesn’t stop. But unless you take the opportunities, life will often not change in any way that you wish it to either.
We can also choose to highlight gratitude in it all.
In what we have, the people we love, the life we are living even if it’s not currently our ideal one.
Death reminds us, the living, of so much. When it shows up in your life I hope that it reminds you to live.
