Fully Living By Contemplating Your Mortality

How often do you think about your own death? Maybe you've never thought about it. Too many of us think that this is a morbid activity and will cause fear and sadness. The reality is that remembering we are going to die one day helps us learn how to live more fully now.

Transcript

A great sage was once asked,

What is the most amazing thing in the world?

To which the sage replied that you can see people dying all around you and you don't think it will happen to you.

Our culture in the West is one where we don't think about our own mortality very often.

In fact,

We don't think about it at all.

The prevailing sentiment is that if we were to contemplate our own death,

That this would create a lot of fear,

A lot of anxiety,

A lot of sadness within us.

And while contemplating our death can be a little bit unsettling in the beginning,

If we continue doing it,

The benefits of contemplating our death are that we start living our lives more fully,

More meaningfully,

More authentically.

Because when we contemplate our death,

We can no longer fool ourselves,

No longer delude ourselves into believing we have endless amounts of time.

We don't.

We are here in these bodies,

On this planet,

For a very short amount of time,

A finite amount of time.

So when we recognize this reality,

It causes a big shift in our perspective of what's important and of what's not important.

We recognize where we've been spending our attention,

Where we've been putting our attention most of our lives,

That we've been spending our time worrying and fretting about the future,

Worrying and fretting about what everyone thinks about us,

Spending time comparing ourselves to other people,

Imagining people have more than us,

Their lives are better than us.

The comparing,

Jealous,

Filled with a lot of guilt,

A lot of shame.

This is where we put most of our attention and when we recognize how limited our lives really are,

How finite they are,

None of this stuff seems important anymore.

We let it all go,

Or at least it doesn't have quite as much of a hold on us as it used to.

So when we contemplate our own death,

The fear that we've been carrying around our whole lives that's been shaping so many of our decisions,

Our choices,

Our actions,

That fear doesn't have as much of a hold on us any longer.

So we finally have the courage to live our lives so that we don't get to our death beds regretting that we wasted our lives because we thought we had endless amounts of time,

Because we thought death was something that happened to other people,

Not to us.

And many of you have heard me talk about Bonnie Ware's book,

The Five Regrets of the Dying.

She is a palliative care nurse and has spent years,

I think decades with people as they were dying.

And she started to notice a trend in the things that they were all saying,

The regrets that they were having on their death bed,

Because they didn't think it would happen to them.

So when they got to their death bed and were reviewing their lives,

The number one regret that came up,

I wish I'd had the courage to live the life I'd wanted to instead of the life that others expected of me.

How easily we let that fear of conforming to what society expects of us,

Of what other people expect of us,

Of how we should be living our lives.

But when we contemplate our own death and we realize we only have a short amount of time here,

That we will not always be here on this planet,

The fears that stop us,

The worries and fears of what other people will think if we do something different,

Suddenly seem very meaningless.

And we have the courage to live our lives more fully.

The number five regret,

I wish I'd allowed myself to be happy on their death beds,

Finally recognizing that happiness is a choice,

That we don't have to stay stuck in our old habits and patterns our whole lives.

We can do things to change that.

And of course,

That's what we're all doing here,

Right?

The path of enlightenment and awakening is the path of happiness,

Of allowing ourselves to be happy,

Of taking the time to look at the ways in which we stop ourselves from being happy,

How we don't allow ourselves to be happy.

And recognizing that this life is finite,

We shouldn't waste it,

Dwelling on all these imaginary things that are happening,

Imagining what other people think about us,

Stopping us from being happy.

We recognize our happiness is important.

So when we contemplate our death,

We make that more of a priority.

The number three regret,

I wish I'd expressed my feelings to people that mattered to me.

How much time do we spend,

You know,

In fear of what they might think if we were to tell someone what they really meant to us,

To tell our friends,

Our family,

To let people know how much their presence in our life affected us,

That we are sharing this journey together,

That we are here on this planet together at this time,

And how much that meant to us.

But we think,

Well,

There's endless amounts of time.

I'll do that later.

There's not.

We have a finite amount of time.

We don't know when this is going to end.

So the more that we contemplate our death,

The irrational fears that have been holding us back from having more meaningful relationships,

From doing things that really matter to us,

That make a difference in the world,

To focusing on the things that are important,

Suddenly we let go of all those things that don't matter,

And we are able to focus on what does matter.

That's what contemplating our death does.

It's not a morose exercise,

A morbid exercise.

It's not meant to create fear in us.

It's meant to wake us up,

To recognize how precious our lives are,

To value the lives that we have,

To stop taking our lives for granted,

And in that waking up,

To abandon the things that don't matter,

That are taking up all of our attention.

And the number two regret on the list,

I wish I hadn't worked so hard.

No one's on their deathbed wishing they'd worked harder.

And of course,

I mean this to a point where we have enough.

You've got enough food,

You've got a nice home,

You've got enough money in the bank.

And yet this drive to keep working so hard,

To accumulate more money,

More material items,

No one's on their deathbed grateful that they had a big bank account.

It's the relationships that matter.

Number four regret,

Keeping in touch with old friends,

Wish we'd kept in touch.

But because our attention was on other things,

We let things go.

The things that mattered,

We weren't focusing on because we thought we had endless amounts of time.

We don't.

We have a limited amount of time.

And as the great Indian yogi,

Atisha says,

And I might be paraphrasing this a little bit,

If you don't contemplate your death in the morning,

Your morning is wasted.

If you don't contemplate death in the afternoon,

Your afternoon is wasted.

If you don't contemplate death in the evening,

Your evening is wasted.

So he's not saying 24 hours a day we're contemplating our death,

But that we are thinking about it periodically throughout the day.

That when you wake up in the morning,

Thousands of people didn't wake up this morning.

But you woke up this morning.

Your eyes opened.

You're going to see the sunrise.

Your body's working.

You can go out to the kitchen and make your favorite cup of tea or coffee and watch the sun rise or read the news,

Talk with your partner.

We take these things for granted,

As though we're always going to be able to do this or that person's always going to be there.

This is all very temporary.

Don't take it for granted.

Remember when you wake up.

Wow,

I woke up.

One day I'm not going to wake up.

So I better take advantage of this.

I better appreciate this precious life that I have.

And then later through the day,

Around lunchtime,

Maybe you're going for a walk and you see some dead leaves on the ground or you see some branches from a tree that's fallen off or a tree that's dying.

And you can remember that's going to happen to me too.

This body is going to decay too and turn to dust,

Just like those leaves,

Just like those branches,

That dead tree.

I mean,

Hell,

We can look at our bodies right now.

For those of us that are old enough,

We can see they're decaying,

But they are going to decay to dust.

These bodies won't be around forever.

Remember that.

And then maybe later on,

You're in your car,

You're driving around,

You're hearing the sounds of the world.

Maybe your windows are down,

You hear some music from another car or you hear some people and you see the sights and you realize the world's going to go on without me.

One day I'm not going to be here,

But all of this is going to continue on.

What am I doing with my life?

How am I leaving?

How am I making my life meaningful to the world?

What kind of a mark am I leaving?

And it doesn't have to be this big grand mission of doing something.

We all know,

We've talked about this a lot,

Just having the courage every day to be kind to other people.

We know what a meaningful impact they have that that has,

Not just on that one person,

But then they go and pay it forward to another person and another person and another person.

So through this huge tapestry of which we're all a part of,

How meaningful our kindness is and the ripple effects that our kindness initiates and leaves and permeates through the world.

So through our kindness,

We can have an amazing effect on the world,

Leaving a positive imprint and really feeling that meaning in our lives today.

So contemplating our death is not meant to be a disturbing exercise.

It's meant to wake us up because we have forgotten to live.

We have forgotten just how precious our lives really are.

And we don't want to be in our deathbeds,

Shocked that we're there,

Surprised,

Doing an inventory of our lives,

Listing all the things we regret.

We don't waste our lives now.

And when we get to our deathbeds,

We will not be shocked because we knew this was going to happen.

It's one of the wisest things we can do to make sure that we live our lives more meaningfully now,

More fully,

To not waste our lives,

To not regret our lives when that day eventually comes.

It will come.

Contemplate your death in the morning,

In the afternoon,

In the evening.

It will change the way you do things.

It will change the way you see the world.

It will change your life.

Reviews

Is this resonates with other listeners I would suggest looking at the Buddha’s five remembrances.

Wow! So inspiring!🙏🏻♥️

Thank you Meredith for this important reminder of what is really important, and how to live a better life, simply. 🙏🏽

Thank you so much for this. I just lost my father last week and all of this contemplation has been up for me. Very illuminating and helpful thank you so much. 🙏🏽🌈❤️

Very good discussion and I appreciate this offering. Thank you 🙏💜

Amazing reality check in I do very often …love this talk thankyou Meredith 🫶🙏💞

Wonderful!

This talk sent me on a roller coaster of contemplation and emotions. I thought about what I might regret and what my current worries are. Thanks for the checks and balances. I was not exactly excited about this topic. But I’m glad I clicked on it. 🙏🏾🌸🙏🏾