The opposite of life is the D word – a word which is dreaded, not talked about, has fear associated with it, fear of the unknown, for some strange reason we are conditioned to brush it under the carpet, close our eyes to it, thinking that we won’t have to face it. Benjamin Franklin said that “There are only two certainties in life – death and taxes”. And just like we evade taxes, we evade the very topic of Death.
Duality – with Life will come death. Different sides of the same coin. We cannot, howsoever hard we may try, we simply cannot run away from what we have to eventually face in terms of leaving our physical body, or seeing our near and dear ones shed away theirs. The fact is that we all too come with expiry dates (DOE which we see on all consumables, medicines etc) stamped on us – the difference is just that we don’t know the exact date and time will be, its invisible. The day we are born, the next moment onwards the clock starts ticking. The Time that we have here on this planet, is not unlimited. Its limited and is constantly depleting. Its like a bank account with x amount of credited time and there after its only a debit from the account. Every second , moment spent will never ever come back. Life is obviously precious and fragile.
My teacher once asked me this question – a question which changed my life forever. He asked, “if for certainty you knew that you only have 24 hours to live, how would you spend those hours and finally how would you like to go? Would you be upset, sad, get angry at people, hold resentment, crib about others or life as such or would you rather spend that time being loving, being nice to everyone, spend that time with family and friends, being grateful, happy, joyful?”
The answer to the first part was very obvious.
I clearly did not want to spend the last 24 hours being unhappy or sad, regretful, ungrateful, doing things that I did not appreciate or like. I wanted to live those 24 hours with honesty, authenticity and integrity, spreading love, happiness and joy.
But I did not how would I want to go…all I knew that I did not want to suffer and I wanted to go peacefully. But the second question on how I would like to go, made me realize that whilst eventually we may start understanding how to really live life freely, nobody teaches us how to go, how to let go of our physicality in which we are so engrossed. Its like living in our house for so many years, going through the daily motions, and then one fine day unexpectedly we receive the eviction orders – for which we are not prepared, had not even imagined that it could happen to us.
And then when we start translating that into all the things that are there in our lives – relationships, experiences, our day to day routine – a sense of awareness trickles in, that the fact is that everyone comes with that limited time. So all our relationships come with limited time, all our experiences are time limited. One day the relationships are there, and the next moment its all gone. And the fact is that we don’t know how to deal with it. We don’t know how to deal with Death as such. We don’t know how to die, how to let go….