I have a terrible time saying goodbye. Letting go feels like dying; so much so that in the moment of departure I look back on everything that came before, remembering the good I did, the bad, and recognizing the disappointment of what can never be. In all my writings and readings I never came across a quote as truly telling as one from Marcus Aurelius who is thought to have said, “The act of dying is one of the acts of life.” Indeed it is one of two acts over which you cannot escape: birth and death. When we are closest to birth the world is possibility and light. When we are closest to death the world may be shaded with the memory of missed opportunities.
I believe I spent too much of my life dwelling on the things I could’ve done, the life I could’ve had, and choices not made or even made in error. These are wasted moments best forgotten as opposed to dwelling on. The hours spent thinking about ‘why not?’ are never as productive or meaningful as getting out there and doing or even pausing to reflect on ‘what next?’
We don’t have forever. We aren’t even promised to end today, so isn’t every moment an opportunity to advance our dreams? If we aren’t living the life we intended, we should be living the life that is intended for us. We should be trying to be the best person we are capable of–our dream person, and we should never ever surrender–never ever settle–until we get there.
Final Thoughts:
- My heart hurt even writing that blog. I am a strong believer of universal karma and the idea that what you put into the world is given back to you. I wrote that blog as if I were dying. I am not dying. Not yet. I am not ending the blog until condition of my death. However, I am inspired by the work of Randy Pausch to model the last lecture as realistically as I can. It seems like people at the edge of life are heard more clearly. There is something compelling about the finality of a person’s existence that makes the last words they write hold value. I want to include this structure as a teaching tool, so I modeled it here today. Now I recognize how hard it is to say such things and not feel your own mortality; to feel your life beating out of existence.
- Part of me wonders if we are all already dead and the mere acceptance of that fact allows us to recognize time not as a constant or an arrow but merely as a state of being that can be altered.