Mortality

A good exercise is to really think about your own mortality. Not in some distant future decades and decades away, but now. Right now. Next 2 months. Next two weeks. You don’t know what to do with it. It’s frightening and some say illuminating, but most of the exercises center around what you find “valuable” in this. To discover where you spend your time. This is fine, but, recently, I’ve begun to hone in more on the visceral aspect of it. What’s it like to not see the couch again. To not taste water. To not be stuck in traffic. I focus, more and more, on the ordinary, and how much I will miss the ordinary things. A bird call. Getting the mail. Walking into a movie. A wave crashing. All of these things things will be gone forever. They will have been extinguished for you. This needn’t result in some huge epiphany or quitting your job or some goal; you put too much pressure on yourself when you do that. Instead, just think about what you are aware of every day and how you won’t be aware of those things anymore, at some point, hopefully decades away, but maybe just a few seconds away. Be aware of what’s in front of you. The light at the intersection. Wind. The feeling of humidity. A beeping of a cash register. Smiles. All of these things are here for maybe an instant. You, again, don’t have to do a thing with any of this, but simply notice it. Your alive simply by doing so.