Memento Mori – Death Becomes Us

Image Credit: Viktor Hanacek

I’m dying. Not of some strange illness or disease but in the way we all are dying. Every day we are one day closer to the end or our lives, whether we like it or not. Until we figure out how to become Lazarus Long, all of us will eventually die. As morbid as it might sound it is important for us to remember this fact.

Death is a funny thing. Most people, including myself, are afraid of it for many reasons. It sounds painful, we don’t truly know what happens when we die, there is too much we want to accomplish before the end, and we don’t want to leave our loved ones. It’s human’s second biggest fear.

We fear death so much we try to push it from our minds instead of confronting it. Death is taboo. Death is scary so we ignore it. We don’t worry about the day to day or our slow creeping march to towards the end. Why would we? Most of us wake up every day fine so why wouldn’t there be a tomorrow.

I heard the author James Altucher once say he knew he was going to live forever because he had over 40 years of statistical data proving him right. Now, I’m sure this was meant to be a joke but I think most of us subconsciously feel the same way. It’s the “there will always be a tomorrow” thought process. The problem with this mindset is it makes us complacent in our own lives, unwilling to focus on the present. So we sit in our dead end jobs or hang out with people we don’t care about because… why not? Unfortunately, our time is finite and we need to think about death.

The Stoics have a phrase they use when thinking about death. The Latin phrase Memento Mori, the practice of focusing or reflecting on one’s death or mortality, is an important arrow in the Stoics quiver. But instead of this being some morbid/emo fixation on death, it should be used to keep us grounded in the present. Remembering we are going to die also helps spur on action in our lives. We don’t know when the end will come and we should ensure we don’t die with regrets. We need to give ourselves permission to make more mistakes, try something we’re afraid of doing, spend more time having adventures, and being with the ones we love.

If we only had one month, one week, or only 24 hours left to live, what we would want to do with our time left? What would we regret not doing? What would we regret wasting too much of our time doing? Well, for most of us there is still plenty of time to go do those things after all. By taking 5-10 minutes to write down everything we want to accomplish in our lives, we can work towards checking them off to create more fulfillment in our lives. Death’s only has to be scary if we live a life of inaction.

This blog came out of a Memento Mori moment for me. I put off many different projects due to my fear of judgement. I would tell myself, “There’s always tomorrow,” but when “tomorrow” came, nothing would happen. In the end, I would put the blog off until “I felt like working on it,” which, of course, never happened. One day I had enough and decided to put some words on a page, posting it for the world to see. I had no clue where this blog will take me but I knew if I didn’t start now I would go nowhere, fast. Now, I’m continuing to post and thinking about the direction of the blog. More excitement and more fear.

I challenge you to create a list of things you would regret doing if you died tomorrow. (A “Bucket List” if you will.) Don’t look at other blog sites, check lists, or ask your friends but write down things you always thought, “This would be AWESOME!” If you think, “HELL YES!” it goes on the list. Then pick one of the ideas on the list and work towards making it happen. I guarantee you won’t regret it.