Remembering Death to Live Your Best Life

Death is coming for us all. I don't mean that to be threatening; I mean it to be relieving. Encouraging. Enlightening.

Today is Halloween—no better day to broach this topic that most people find so deeply terrifying. The topic of death is avoided like the plague in modern Western society, but I'm of the utterly correct opinion that if you want to be happy in life, you need to be accepting of death. I don't put my foot down about a lot, but I put my foot down about this. There are plenty of roads that lead to Rome, but all of them have in common an acceptance of the inevitable: the end of all things. 

You Only Live Once: Don't Waste It

Life is precious. These are cloying, tired words, but when they're spoken in earnest, they mean something true. In our day-to-day, it's easy to forget that we're here only for a short while, bound on either side by an infinite nothingness. At first, this might seem macabre, but the more you ask your mind to settle into this initially uncomfortable notion, the more you can find yourself...free. If you're going to cease to be, what really matters? Not your bills, not your boss's opinion, not the weird way your mouth opens to the side when you talk (guilty as charged). Death clarifies your life like nothing else can. 

What's more, we owe all of life to death. Something can only exist in the presence of nothing, creation in the presence of obliteration. If you're at all thankful for your life, be thankful for your death, and for the death of everything that's preceded you and will follow. 

So this Halloween, celebrate your greatest fear. Your own impending death.