This is the last of the sections of this summary of Robert Greene’s Laws of Human Nature.
The catchphrase is: Meditate on our common mortality.
“By connecting to death, we connect more profoundly to the reality and fullness of life.”
Near death experiences have a paradoxical effect that make us feel more alive and awake. You can make your life more meaningful and productive by being aware of your mortality. Become viscerally aware of death. Reflect on it. Visualize yourself at the moment you die and try to picture what you are doing or where you might be at the time. Remember that your remaining years on this planet are a deadline for completing a life project.
Mortality
Observe mortality. Consider the billions of people who have come before you. Most of those alive now will no longer be here in 60 years.
“We are all part of a brotherhood and sisterhood of death.”
Embracing Death
Embracing death will make it easier to cope with all other pain and hardships in your life. Adversity is an opportunity to grow and enlighten us. Take time to contemplate the sublime. The infinity of time and space makes our daily struggles seem trivial. Faced with the vastness of nature, our ego seems insignificant. Being aware of your mortality will free you of insignificant worries and allow you to concentrate solely on your life’s work and help you to explore every possibility to its fullest.
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My own notes:
There is something to this, but as a born-again Christian, I have a different approach.
I don’t accept death as the finality of my existence. My aim here is to obey the Lord, and let Him take care of what my purpose is.
That said, I do get the gist of this. I have often told a story of my own reckoning with death. Years ago, there was a long-form article in the LA Times about trucking deaths. The article started with an anecdote about a couple who worked in different parts of town. They were going to meet for lunch, but the wife never showed up. The husband was just sitting and waiting until he got the suspicion something was wrong. As it turned out, a truck had lost control, overturned, and smashed the car his wife was driving to meet him, killing her instantly.
The story had a profound effect on me, causing me to internalize this fact that none of us are guaranteed any amount of time on this earth. I might not make it back home this evening. I might come home and find my wife has suffered some fatal event. We just don’t know. So I made it an important thing in my life to make sure that I lived in such a way, that IF one of us were taken, nothing would be left on the table that I’d regretted. I’ve done my best to tell her that I love her every day. To let those that I do love know that I love them. To be kind and respectful.
Perhaps based on that sense, I prepared years ago for my parents deaths. I knew it was inevitable, and I just prepared myself mentally that it would happen. When my dad passed last year, I thought of it as him being set free from the bondage of a deteriorating body, from a life that had become a shell of what it was meant to be. Because I recognize we just weren’t created to live forever in this body.
Part of basic Christianity is this idea that we’re all mortal, we won’t live forever in this life, and we have to deal with what happens afterward. We don’t believe in reincarnation, there will be no slowly working towards a better state- we have this life to acknowledge God as the creator and submit ourselves to him. He has paved the way for us. He loves us, he died for us by taking our sin, the thing that would separate us from him, and going to the cross. But he did more than just die for us, he rose again, conquering sin and death. He offers this free gift of eternal life to all that will turn from their sin and follow him. As it says in Romans 10: If you confess with your mouth that Jesus Christ is Lord, and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.
So I don’t have quite the same outlook on death as the author, but it’s not completely divergent either. I believe in an after-life, and I believe that our purpose here has to be driven by God, not ourselves. But I can also acknowledge that this life IS important, and being aware of our mortality is too. Purposefully being aware of it can focus our energy. I myself, even being aware of death, sort of crossed a bridge when I turned 50. It suddenly hit me that, even if I were to live a pretty full and long life, I was closer to death at that point than birth. I had a limited amount of time left, and it wasn’t likely to be as long as what I had already experienced.
I have this mental trick I’ll do when I’m thinking about time. If something is a year away, I might be tempted to think- wow, a whole YEAR! But then I’ll think, remember back to one year ago. Does it seem like a long time? Not at all. What about 5 years ago? Not that long. So I’ll think, just like the last year passed quickly, so will the upcoming year.
Applying that to my own years left…in ways it seems like yesterday that I was graduating high school with my life ahead of me. But in other ways it feels like forever ago. Whatever time I have left will have passed just as quickly as that amount of time did already. And what do I have left on the table that I might regret not having done?
The good thing for me as a believer is that I’m trying to let the Lord guide my life. Whatever he wants to do, I’ll try and set my hand to plow that field. I don’t have big plans of my own to change the world. But I’m convinced that whatever the Lord has me do, is, in fact, changing the world in just the way he wants it changed.