Memento Mori

Life is not short. I’ll explain: we feel like it’s short because time passes by quickly. And if it isn’t, on hindsight, it did. But when we think we have quantified it quite well, we don’t, really. It happens to me. It happent to everyone. It’s human, actually. Because time is beyond our full comprehension.

But even if life is not short: living well is the way to do it. Without regrets as heavy as lead, without being passive, negative. You can love more. Not overspill it of course, but love more, and more deeply.

Laugh more. Understand your emotions, and feel them, let them intensify, then fade away. Go on adventures. Near, far. If you haven’t found someone you love, then go and search for him or her.

When you understand that time is sacred, everything becomes urgent: you can leave a job that just does not suit you. Even if it means working in a business that right now does not bring you any income. “If there’s a will, there’s a way.” Truly. Honestly.

You can go and be around nature, feel the sun of your skin, the breeze. Savor a sunset, a good meal. But wasting your time aimlessly will not bring you anywhere. Sometimes watching a binge TV is good for your soul. But consistently, it isn’t.

Enrich your life: go read a book, immerse in a hobby, spend time in water bodies, fly abroad, travel near, go out with a friend, have a heart to heart conversation. Life is filled with opportunities, but we’re the ones who need to create them.

We’re the navigators of our own seas. We ought explore everything we want to explore in our own unique way and flourish. We are not here to wither. We are here to learn, experience, and grow. We are here for a reason.

The stoics practiced this way of living methodically. They contemplated daily upon questions that ponder about immediacy: if they died today, how will they live that last day of their lives?

Death is a scary thing, but isn’t sleeping kind of similar? Where are we when we sleep? Aren’t we in a different dimension? Because if we are not scared of dreaming, of sleeping, why will we be petrified of a thing that is quite similar?

But life is holy, and death makes it clearer. If we want clarity, we should focus on the fact that it’s a waste of time to overthink and scramble our thoughts and destroy our clarity, because lack of clarity can be due to so much thoughts going in so many directions.

Sometimes what’s precise is what’s clear. If we’ll let go of what isn’t serving us, just clean out and wash from ourselves the heavy dust of all the things that we don’t need, we’ll be free, maybe even happy.

Happiness is a thing that mustn’t be chased. Because what you chase after, runs away from you. And that’s an endless cycle. When we give joy to arise from inside us, it arrives.

Naturally, just like the sun rises in the morning and sets at dusk. And those realizations come naturally, too, when we have a big reason to think about them.

The reason is that life’s not short, but urgent. Because there’s a finish line. And if we’ll sleepwalk through it, we’ll miss it. We won’t have another shot in this life, in this body.

We only have one shot, and that’s not supposed to be stressful. It’s supposed to be liberating. Life is full of color, even if sometimes hard. Too hard even, perhaps.