Existing is a Privilege

“You could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and think.”

Marcus Aurelius

We’ve talked about this before, but the morbidity of the name of my blog has come up a couple of times this week, so I thought another blog might not hurt. It is probably worth addressing every so often.

People are most likely bringing it up because I have mentioned that I am considering changing the name of my business to Dying Daily Counseling and Meditation. I love Amor Fati, but naming your business something that is hard to say and difficult to explain without having to discuss Nietzsche and Stoicism first doesn’t seem to be the best idea. I need a marketing department.

So, dying daily.

Here’s the deal, you are going to die someday.

Everyone you know will die someday.

If we bar religious stories from the mix, everyone who has ever lived, is currently living and will ever live, has died or will die someday. It is the common ground for all of us.

For me, nothing makes me more intentional with how I live or more mindful of how I treat people than being aware that I will die, and that it could happen at any time and any place.

I am not the main character in some story, I am just another human, one of over 100 billion who have ever lived.

As we’ve discussed here before, I probably won’t have some cool death scene or a premonition that it is coming, I will just die.

I will get t-boned in an intersection (they were Snapchatting) or I will be riding my bike and that same Snapchatter comes along. Maybe my house catches fire while we are asleep or my neighbor finally gets tired of me rocking Sugar Ray from my truck at 3am.

Just kidding, it’s Creed.

We all think we have all the time in the world, and I would bet that a great number of the dead humans out there thought the same thing.

But death sneaks up on us, you can’t plan for it. This can be a source of anxiety or a source of intentionality. It’s up to you.

I could leave life right now.

I don’t want to do or say or think anything that doesn’t matter or is negative. I don’t want to do or say or think anything that separates me from the people I love or from humanity as a whole. I don’t want to do or say or think anything that is waste of this short window of being I have been given. I screw up all, the time, but I try to better all the time too.

So, I don’t see the idea of keeping death present as being morbid or depressing. It helps me keep my focus on what matters and maintain an awareness that being alive is an awesome thing.

Existing is a privilege.

I want to remember that.