i was out with some friends the other night and i asked the question ‘what do you want to remember when you’re on you’re death bed?’
it, uh, kind of killed the conversation(no pun intended), but i do think that it’s a valid and germaine question,
and one that should possibly guide the ways in which we lead our lives.
when you’re 80 or 90(or 175 or 246) and lying on your death bed, what do you want to remember? what do you want to look back on?
many of us work under the assumption that life is an infinite resource. it’s an understandable assumption, as all that we’ve known up until this point are youth and life. but in the back of our minds we know that at some point we’ll die, which seems, at best, to be an almost arbitrary concept given that all we’ve known thus far is life.
someday you will die. and someday i will die. we will shuffle off our little mortal coils and slip into something more or less comfortable. i hope that you and i die in a comfortable place surrounded by loved ones, and i hope that you and i die with the knowledge that we’ve lived good and satisfying lives.
which leads me to the question: when you’re lying on your death bed, and you know that you only have minutes or hours left until you die, what do you want to remember?
what will you regret?
will you feel a sense of peace and contentment, or will you be filled with regret and sadness?
a lot of people try to live by the adage, ‘live each day as if it’s your last’.
which is a nice adage, but trying to put it into practice would be kind of exhausting(i.e-going to water parks, and dancing, and sky-diving, and swimming with manta rays, and eating great mexican food, and writing epistles to everyone you know, and etc, every day might lead you to an early grave.).
so i’m not going to say, ‘live each day as if it’s your last’, but i will say that we should try to live our lives in such a way that when we’re lying on our death beds we can look back at our lives with a sense of peace and happiness and contentment.
thanks,
moby
