A moment is all you are. You are a mere breath, the flick of an eye, a beat of the heart, a firing synapse, and nothing more. Your short seventy, eighty, ninety, or maybe one hundred years is a slight drop in the ocean we call time if you are privileged enough to live out your days. Yet time is merely a construct of your own imagining—a way for you to make sense of the world. However, many struggle throughout life because they refuse to accept their impending demise. They run from it, not realizing that the key to understanding life is to embrace your mortality.
This doesn’t mean you unnecessarily fixate on death in a worrisome way. It simply means you recognize that death is a part of life and that one day, you, too, will die.
Your heart will stop beating inside your chest, and your brain will cease to function. Breath will no longer fill your lungs. A stillness will take over you, and eventually, your body will decay and turn back to dust.
Family and friends will mourn. Some solemnly, others in open anguish, and yet, in a matter of moments, they too will become dust.
Within a few decades, perhaps over the course of a century, your name will be forgotten and your existence unknown.
A small few may be remembered for millennia, yet in due time, they, too, will be forgotten.
Whatever accomplishments you’ve strived for will pass away as well.
All your stress and arguments, disagreements, hatred, anger, joy, and love will fall to the wayside and be nothing more than a small fraction of energy slowly moving onward as the faintest ripple as if a grain of sand was dropped into the ocean.
Nothing you’ve worked so hard to accomplish will remain.
Your wealth will dissipate and be reabsorbed into the energetic system of commerce, whatever that may look like in the coming years. The cars you prize so much will rust. Jewelry will be taken, sold, stripped bare, and melted down for other purposes if not lost beneath the earth or taken up and worn by others you may consider to be worthy or unworthy to wear your prized possessions.
The home you created will begin to rot and wither away, and as such, it will be demolished and rebuilt to suit someone else’s needs.
Most people fear the flickering candle flame that is their life because they know how fragile that flame is. Many precariously hold fast to the wick, attempting to melt through the wax surrounding it before letting go permanently, and yet, at any moment, a gust of wind can extinguish the fire.
This is why it’s essential to embrace your mortality—to embrace the unyielding fact that one day, you will no longer be present on this plane of existence.
The hard. Cold. Terrifying truth is that one day. You. Will. Die.
You will cease to exist.
Despite your best efforts to create a legacy that lasts to preserve a small semblance of who you are, it is ultimately done in vain.
If our sun still has several billion years of life before it winks out of existence, you can bet that your name will have been discarded billions of years before. No remembrance and no desire from future generations to understand who you were.
It will be as if someone closed you in a dark room, turned off the lights, and scrubbed your memory from the earth.
Embracing Your Mortality
Recognizing and learning to embrace your mortality can help ease the suffering you may be experiencing in life.
So many times, we work ourselves up into a frenzy over trivialities. When pressed against the scope of a million years, a thousand, or even one hundred for that matter, your problems are, in a sense, pointless and meaningless.
You didn’t get that “thing” you were after (promotion, car, house, vacation, relationship, front-row seats to your favorite band), so what? These all dissipate when you realize that everything is temporary and impermanent.
When you face the absurdity of your delusion that in this life, you are immortal, your struggles and suffering seem to have less power than they did previously.
Saying you suffer from the delusion of immortality doesn’t mean you think you are immortal; it’s merely stressing the idea that you run from death because you don’t know how to make friends with it. As a result, you cling to life so desperately that you trick yourself into thinking as if you were immortal because you refuse to think about how one day you will surely die.
Embracing your mortality, however, begins to free you from the suffering because you realize you no longer need to cling to it.
Someone hurt you? So what? Soon, you’ll both be dead, and the situation carried on in your heart will dissipate the moment you release your grasp on this life. If that’s the case, why not release your grasp right now?
Why continue to cling to a dead man or woman’s words, actions, or judgments?
Like everything else in life, these are fleeting moments within an infinite spectrum of time. Your existence in our current reality is extremely short, so why waste it on suffering?
Does this mean difficult situations don’t arise? Of course not! They’re abundant in multitudinous forms.
Still, knowing this life is as shifting sands, why carry the weight of a story that is already dissolving into nothingness?
Besides, holding onto your suffering is an illusion of control over a life that feels out of control. Yet, the past is already gone without the ability for you to rectify the future regardless of the manipulation you exert onto the present moment.
Instead, let go of the past and hold on to the present. It’s the only moment that’s real.
Once you understand this, embracing your mortality becomes a little easier because you begin to see that it will also be a moment bound by the present, even if it’s smiling back at you from the future.
However, your present moment doesn’t contain suffering.
Your mind may exert suffering onto the present moment, but that’s because you aren’t truly present. If you were present, your suffering wouldn’t exist. It couldn’t! Because you would be too busy being fully present to notice the suffering.
Be Fully in the Present Moment
This concept has been taught throughout history by some of the greatest minds who ever lived—teachers, sages, emperors and rulers, paupers, holy men and women, and unsung heroes.
It’s a simple truth that can fix many issues in life. Yet you can struggle with it so much because you haven’t taken the time to practice living this way.
You were born into a society fixated on external pleasures, often found in ruminating on past and future events without regard for what’s right in front of you.
It’s a tragedy in and of itself.
The fact that you and I, the collective and the one, struggle so much in allowing ourselves to be present. We miss so many things. There are so many missed opportunities to experience the fullness of life simply because we don’t know how to be present.
My kids have been growing up before my very eyes, and yet, I’ve missed so much because I forget and, in some cases, refuse to stay present.
I get caught up in the drama I create for myself as a way to feed my addiction to the past. Past events and programming. I would like to shed many of them, but they’ve become so infused into my being that letting go becomes difficult.
However, the more I embrace my mortality, the easier it is to let go of everything I hold onto and become present.
It’s in the present moment that I find peace. This moment, right here, right now, is full of it. It’s full of life.
The energy is boundless.
If you’re looking for a way to move past whatever emotional or mental pain you might be suffering, one of the best things you can do is to train yourself to be as present as possible.
An easy way to train yourself to be present is to learn how to embrace your mortality.
Because one day…
You will die.
Josiah
P.S.
I try to be straightforward in all my newsletters, but this is a special one that I feel is pertinent because most people are not willing to face this subject until it’s too late. This happens to be on the darker side of what you’re probably used to reading. I understand that, but it’s important for you to ponder these ideas from time to time. I don’t suggest living there long term, or life will become dreary quickly. However, deep introspection into this topic can be beneficial and even healthy when done here and there.
In light of this, thank you for reading. We’ll see if we can lighten the mood a bit on the next one.
