Life, Death, Acceptance, Trust, and Miracles

We Are All Gonna Die Someday. We Know It. But Do We?

We are all gonna die someday. We know it.

But do we?

Do we live our lives with this in mind?

A colorful Mexican sugar scull / Día de Muertos

“What a dark proposition is this?” you might ask.

“We can't be walking around, going to the gym, picking up the kids from school, with this thought swirling in our heads all day long; death holding his hatchet and watching over us. That's pure anxiety!”

Yes that's true, yet most people are subconsciously operating within this existential dread, anyway.

This dread is experienced and expressed in various ways.

The emergency state is the most common state, in our everyday modern lives, that the awareness of the ever approaching death puts us in.

“I have to do this thing by then…, and that other thing within this year…, I have to make it to senior level in the next two years…, I have to make 100,000$ by…” and so on and so forth.

This deadline approach to life and death, is what makes everyone literally running for their lives.

Other people take a different approach to this deadline.

“We are all gonna die anyway, so why bother? Why not grab and eat now what you can?”

Time after time, they grab and eat, and grab and eat, and again…

And they seem to be doing just fine—successful and all—up to the point where they end up eating their friends, their family, their colleagues, and their own soul.

Then, there's this other group. The paralyzed. Death is coming for them!

Fight, fly, …or stay still in your hole.

They are the ones who are sceptic of everything unknown and new. They retreat in their quite familiarity, with a false buried hope of tricking and escaping death. They often see only problems and they are the first ones to advise you on avoiding a certain course of action, by pointing out and exaggerating all the potential and unforeseen pitfalls.

“You never know what shit might go down,” they say, “better be safe than sorry.”

And of course, we have the nihilists. “Nothing is of value, nothing makes sense, there is no purpose, we are all puppets in a cosmic joke! Why bother about it?”

Entrenched in their fear, they mock everyone who is at least trying to make something out of this life. Their nihilistic fear makes them put down everything and everyone in order to justify themselves and mask their deeply rooted fear. They often appear assertive and dismiss everything that has to do with the average human endeavors and culture. They are just trying to feel a little bit better about themselves.

There are, of course, more expressions of this existential dread, but those are the most common ones.

Those are the results of the simple intellectual awareness that death is upon us.

We need to go beyond this elementary knowing, we need to reach the understanding.

Knowing and understanding are two different things. Related but different.

What we want is the understanding. But things aren't straightforward there either.

For example everyone knows how a car works. You turn the key, the engine starts, motion is transmitted to the wheels and off you go! Simple. I know it too. This is knowing.

Mechanics have an understanding about this process. They understand all the technicalities and intricacies of how the car actually works.

How the engine works, how the motion is being transferred, what kind of metals are in the engine, the properties of the rubber on the wheels, etc. This is understanding.

This type of intellectual understanding is not fully applicable to life though. Life is not something we have manufactured. Life just is. We're all part of it and embedded in it. Along comes death. It's part of the deal.

But, if just knowing isn't enough and an intellectual understanding is not applicable, where are we left with this? What are we missing?

One missing ingredient is acceptance.

Acceptance is the catalyst, that can turn the simple intellectual knowing to a deep understanding of the process of life. When we accept things for what they are, the mind sees more clearly and we become truly free.

But acceptance is a function of the heart, not a function of the brain.

“So, are we to just sit there with an open heart, accept that death is inevitable, and all will be well?”

Well, not exactly, but in a sense, yes.

First of all, acceptance doesn't mean to just sit there and do nothing. On the contrary, acceptance of what is, will open up a whole new array of possibilities for you to act upon.

When we truly and deeply accept the inevitability of death, the fog dissolves and we become able to regard what really matters in our lives. Choices and actions that were previously beyond our operating procedures now seem at reach and applicable.

That said, you can't just wake up one morning and decide to live your life in deep acceptance of the sure advent of death. Not that simple.

In order to accept death, first you have to accept life.

You have to accept it in its full spectrum.

You have to accept its ups and downs, its sudden turns, the struggles, the bad weather, the wins, the thing that broke, your imperfection, the good weather, your parents, your shitty job, your weaknesses, even that rude taxi driver on your way to your yoga class. You have to accept everything for what it is.

Whatever you accept for what it is, no more has a hold on you.

So, we are in this rather strange loophole where we have to accept death in order to enjoy life, but in order to accept death, we have first to accept life with all of its peculiarities; which we don't.

Why?

Clearly we are having a trust issue.

What we are not trusting we are not accepting.

This is what the fear of death does to you. It makes you not to trust life and subsequently since you're part of it, the less you trust life, the less you trust your own self. Don't go down this dark road.

Trust is the other missing ingredient. And this, like acceptance, is solely on you.

Acceptance will present you with new scenery never encountered before and trust will give you the courage to walk through it and into the unknown territory of non-intellectual understanding.

Open your heart.

Trust and accept the totality of yourself.

Trust and accept the totality of life and death.

All you have to do is make a decision.

“There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.”

― Albert Einstein —

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Photo by Everardo Sanchez