Thinking about death

I've been thinking about death lately, my death to be more precise.  It isn't anything morbid, I'm not sick nor have I had a premonition that my demise is at hand.  No, it is more looking at what I'll miss when I'm gone.  Ever since I turned 50 just over a year ago I have been very aware of my mortality.  Time on this earth really is finite.  We have so many days or, as my colleague at work says--so many chews--then we're done.  There are no do-overs, no instant replays or rewinds.  When it is over, it is over.  Everything that you were going to be and do in your life is done, any unrealized potential will never be realized, all the regrets are for nothing.  When you're done--you really are done.

What has struck me about this meditation has been the realization that what saddens me the most is not those things I did and regret or the things I didn't do (really, I'm mostly past regrets), it is that this marvelous adventure I call my life will just be over one day.  There won't be any more incredibly inspiring people to meet, new places to see, new music to grab me by the proverbial ball (if you've seen my name and headshot, you know they are only metaphorical). No new dances to dance or marvels of nature to experience first-hand.  One day, it will just be over.

I didn't not have such a great life for the first 40 years.  I had to work hard to get myself (my inner self) to a place where I was at peace with what life gave me and what life took away or made very apparent I would never possess.  So I began looking long and hard at what life brought my way and who and how I had to be to fully embrace this life of finite possibility.  I guess that is part of getting older; when you are young, everything really does seem (and perhaps is) possible.  The older you get, the fewer possibilities there are in your life, so you have to choose and, by choosing, you eliminate even more.  At first you aren't even aware of choosing--life just seems to come to you with one option only.  How is that a choice?  I guess where the choice comes in is being aware that this is what life is offering you.  You can say yes and go with it, or you can say no and resist and be angry at the raw deal life is giving you, like you deserve something different.  When I stopped feeling like I was a total failure because my vision of what my life could and should be didn't bear any relationship with what my life actually was, despite my best efforts (and they were very good efforts, I got a lot of recognition and even some awards for those efforts), I finally chose the life I had rather than some pipe-dream life that I had created out of my hopes, dreams and, more importantly, fears.   Once I did that, everything changed and I had a life better than I had ever dreamed possibly.  Of course there are things I still wish were different--who doesn't want more money and the freedom it brings, a different job, more free time--but deep down inside, I know there have been many moments when I have been truly happy in this life that I now have.  Those moments are golden and I treasure each one more than the last now that I am aware that they are finite in number and one day there will be no more.

Maybe this meditation on death (and therefore life) makes little sense to the young.  Life is a journey and the landscape and scenery, at least in my case, have changed radically since my teens and 20s.  It has taken the journey of more than 3 decades to arrive at a place similar to where I started, but with the added bonus of having learned so much first-hand through my myriad experiences.  If there is a message to take away from all of this perhaps it is to always be open to what life sends your way, even when it doesn't look very much what like your image of what your life should be.  I guess the goal here is to get to a place where life is a marvelous adventure and one that you are fully engaged in.  No matter what road you have to take to get there, this is an important way station and one I hope everyone reaches, each in his or her own good time. 

It took some serious meditation on death to truly appreciate my life.  To life!