Why death is a blessing

You’re sitting on your couch, watching tv, scrolling in social media, playing video games, or watching some youtube videos one after another, suddenly and out of nowhere, a shocking and staggering thought falls on you from the sky, dropping on your head a load of existentialist questions:

What if I’m going to die tomorrow? Why am I wasting my time like this? What if I were to die before accomplishing anything in my life? Why I’ll want to plan for anything in my life if I could die in the middle of trying to attain it? ...etc

I went through this experience several times, and it never failed to give me the chills, whenever I give the idea the freedom to run riot inside my head, it becomes like entering one of those scary haunted houses where you get surprised by one agitating thought after another.

I dare to say everyone goes through this experience, yet the majority tend to forget about it after several minutes from its occurrence, but those who don’t manage to shake it off from their minds, get severely impacted by its deep and diverse interpretations.

I like to consider this thought as a two-faced coin, which face you’re seeing depends mainly on how you’re holding it and how you’re looking at it.

There is the first type who get the dark and pessimistic side of it:

Those are the ones who, after undergoing this experience, somehow lose their faith in life, they seize to see the purpose of actually struggling and fighting to achieve something and making the effort to reach certain ambitions and goals, they start to think, why bothering at all if we could die tomorrow, the next week or even the next month, why trying to make a difference and leave an impact in the world if we could leave it before witnessing its outcome.

Sadly, if your perspective of life becomes like this, then it’s difficult to come around and change it, living starts to look meaningless and irrelevant, and nothing seems to motivate you anymore.

Then there is the second type who get the bright and positive side of it:

I think this kind of people are the luckiest and most fortunate ones at all, they get a huge advantage over the first type and even over those who just forget about the experience and somehow block it from their minds.

After going through this experience, they get a huge boost of self-motivation and will power thinking primarily:

Well if I don’t know how or when I’m going to die, why sit around waiting for it, what if it comes after 5O years from now? I won’t waste those years waiting for my time to come, I’ll get up and pursue my dreams, and maybe when the moment arrives, I won’t have any regrets or remorses.

Why do I call this kind of people lucky? Well because they tend to have the same resolutions about life similar to what people who go through a near-death experience get, but without actually dying then coming back.

If you ask anyone who went through a near-death experience, what did it change about you?

They’ll probably say, it changed their perspective of life, knowing how everything would fade away instantly like switching off the light, how being and not being are separated by a thin and slender string that could be chopped in a matter of seconds.

The thought of death could be very frightening, and even if not everyone undergoes a near-death experience or get haunted constantly by the mere thought of it, everyone sleep, and sleep is like a teaser of how death would look like, and was well described by Ursula k le Guin when she said <sleep is just death being shy>

Death is inevitable, we can’t avoid it or anticipate it, and constantly thinking about it wouldn’t do us any good, so the best way to interact with this idea is by consistently trying to accomplish our dreams and goals, trying to make an impact and leave our stamp in this world if we could, keeping in mind that we as humans represent a short glimpse, a brief moment from this world and universe’s history, so there is no need to stress out about why or when our time will come, instead let’s try to make the most of it and leave it better than how we found it.

“Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose, you are already naked, there is no reason not to follow your heart “: Steve Jobs