Death sucks, and premature death sucks worse. But it’s part of the package deal of getting to be alive. It happens because you, and all the people around you, are part of the world; the physical, natural world, with all of its wonders and horrors. It’s a world that doesn’t really care whether you live or die,
whether you suffer or rejoice, and to some people that can seem bleak and cold. But it’s a world of which we are a part, a world which we are intimately connected to down to our very molecules — not a world that stands apart from us and punishes us for reasons we can never fathom.
And without a god, you don’t have to figure out what purpose your death is serving. You don’t have to torture yourself trying to figure out the motivations of the physical universe. It doesn’t have any. So you can accept the inevitability of death, and get on with your life.
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I’ve been doing professional freelance writing, mostly as a sideline, since I was in my twenties. I’ve known for a long time that writing was what I wanted to do with my life. But it wasn’t until I turned 40 that I got serious about making it a priority. Not just in theory; not just the kind of “making it a priority” that involves telling everyone you know what a high priority something is for you. It became an actual priority. It became the kind of priority that involves making sacrifices. The kind of priority that means missing parties and movies and concerts because you have to spend that time working. The kind of priority that involves staying up until four in the morning to meet your deadlines, sometimes for days in a row. The kind of priority that involves taking a less demanding job for less than half your previous pay — with all the sacrifices of comfort and pleasure and security that go along with that.
And I never would have done it if I hadn’t had my mid-life crisis wake-up call. I never would have done it if I hadn’t started to get panicked about how little time I had left to do it.
In other words, I never would have done it without death.
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I’m a very deadline-driven person. And death is a deadline.
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The finality of death is giving my life motivation and focus. It’s driving me to accomplish things that I’d put off indefinitely without it. Death has turned me from a happy-go-lucky slacker chick with some vague creative goals but no real plans for reaching them, into an ambitious, determined woman with a clear sense of what she wants to do with her life and what she needs to do to make it happen.
//And what I found was that, sometimes — often, maybe even most of the time — the best way to deal with difficult and painful emotions is to stop trying to fix them and just let myself feel them. When I let myself actually feel my emotions, they tend to pass. Sometimes they come back, of course; but then they pass again. And when I let myself feel my emotions instead of dodging them, they’re not compounded by the meta-fear, the fear of the emotion adding to whatever the emotion is that I’m afraid of.
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The idea that each one of us was astronomically lucky to have been born at all, and that complaining that our lives aren’t infinite is like winning a million dollars in the lottery and complaining that we didn’t win a hundred billion, or indeed all the money in the world.