Death has a way of insistently intruding into our complacent, almost cozy sense of ourselves. News of someone’s death or premonitions of our own slices through whatever mood we’re in, whether we’re happy or depressed. Death throws life into bright relief. Only from inside the frame of its shadows can we engage the moving picture that is life.
Without benefit of death’s frame, we are simply lost in life’s kaleidoscopic images, scenes and dramas. Many people actually need thoughts of death to stimulate them to really come alive. It has now become a cliché that if your doctor “gives” you six months to live, you will immediately pursue your “bucket list,” rising instantly from your accountant’s desk to take off for a long sky-diving trip in the Himalayas. In fact, psychologists have identified an entire group of people who crave the heightened sense of life that rushes through their blood and brains only when they are exposed to an adventure-provoked danger. What is truly harder, though, is to enliven one’s sense of the world minute by minute, and day by day, even while remaining seated at that accountant’s desk. Learning to enliven the moment – to perceive the extraordinary in the ordinary minute - is to be mindful in the present, as the Buddhists characterize it. That is the truest purpose of life.
