Facing Death With Ease Can Transform Your Life

We are so used to seeing and categorizing certain events and situations always in the same way that we rarely realize how life can be understood in different ways.

One of the moments when I better realized this was, while zapping on TV, I found the movie “The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button”.

Without haste, I saw a couple of scenes, shortly after I returned to the beginning of the film and spent a few hours enchanted by that unique story. For those who don’t know the movie, it tells the story of Benjamin Button, a man who is born old and who gets younger and younger as time goes by.

That way of looking at life backwards was for me a joyful surprise, at first by the contrast, then by the improbable charms that the story was revealing.

Perhaps because of the age at which he was born, Benjamin Button describes and faces everything that is happening to him in life with great calm and naturalness, as if it were normal to grow up that way. And it was so for him.

Death as a common visitor

For this reason, his first years of life spent in a nursing home, had as much or more joy for him than any child, but in a different context. Days of anniversaries and deaths followed each other with great frequency and with great ease. Death became “natural” to him from the beginning, as he explains in this dialogue:

“(…) death was a common visitor.

People came and went.

You always knew when someone left us.

There was a silence in the house.

(…) For every one that died,

someone would come to take their place. “

A wonderful place to grow up

Most of us would probably think that a nursing home would be a “terrible” place to grow up.

But for Benjamin Button, it was not so. Events that for “normal people“ would be occasions of great excesses (of joy or sadness), were for him very “natural”.

Little things that we usually only value over the years were “presented” to him from the beginning as the only things that mattered.

Benjamin Button’s experience was different, so he was also able to feel things differently and found there an excellent place to grow.

“It was a wonderful place to grow up.

I was with people who had shed

all the inconsequence of earlier life.

Left wondering about the weather,

the temperature of a bath,

the light at the end of a day. “

True or perception?

The life experience that Benjamin Button reveals in this story helps to break in our minds several rules and perceptions that we consider as absolute truths.

It also shows us that many of the things that we classify as tragic and final are not so definitive after all. The way we view them, the importance we attach to them are only the results of the way these situations are socially viewed in the culture in which we are educated in. It is not something that is part of them, it's just a quality that we attribute to them.

It also helps us to relativize, to give less importance to many sad moments that we face in a specific way because we think this is the correct way — and the only possible way — to deal with them.

Observing these situations with some distance, we will discover that many of the events that we value a lot and that we classify as serious, definitive, or horrible, are not so important.

They are often just normal events and are part of the course of life and the normal functioning of nature. If we look at them from this new perspective, we can achieve great improvements in our physical and mental health.

By practicing some distance, we can learn to live our day to day in a much calmer way and to be happier.

Quotes are excerpts from dialogues of “The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button”, a film by David Fincher movie with Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett.

If you have not seen the movie yet, I highly recommend it. See the trailer: