Do You Fear Death?
Quotes and Lyrics
I was recently watching a documentary about the life of Sidney Poitier, and there was something really inspiring that he said in it. For context, Sidney was a brilliant Bahamian-American actor who changed the landscape of acting and how society viewed race in popular culture in the 1960s and even to this day. He recently died and, in one of his last interviews, he had said, “...and when I die, I will not be afraid of having lived.”
Wow! This one really hit me, coming from a man who knew that his time was almost up on this earth. Even though we as humans have an intense fear of death (What happens next? What’s the point if we are going to just die anyway?), the real fear is the fear of life, in a sense. We fear not having truly lived, not experiencing this life as fully as possible. Our existential crises can often be traced back to this rather terrifying subject. (If we only have a limited time on this earth and the clock is ticking every second, are we actively taking advantage of everything that life has to offer?) It’s easy to get caught up in that line of thinking.
On a similar note, one of my favorite Bob Dylan lyrics is, “he not busy being born is busy dying” [from “It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)]. It is true that when we are not living, loving, and expressing ourselves fully in our lives, we are simply ticking off time and getting closer to death. When we are not in the energy of Love, we slip into the energy of fear.
Try This Exercise
Here is a quick little exercise you can use to check in on yourself to see whether you feel you are really living fully: picture yourself in your nineties being interviewed. The interviewer asks you if you’re afraid to die. What do you say? Do you reflect back to this current time and feel joy and gratitude that you were able to live your life so freely and fully, or do you look back with fears and regrets, feeling as though you did not put your best foot forward?
Being honest with yourself in this exercise can be really telling. You get an almost instant read on how you’re feeling about your life in the present moment. If you’re feeling great about it, you know that you’re on the right path. If you’re feeling any sense of shame, regret, anxiety, or self-hatred, it’s time to start peeling back the layers to see what’s underneath all of that. The beauty of it is that it’s never too late to shift your course in a more Loving direction.
Love Transcends Us
In my view, if someone in their nineties can honestly say that they have had, and continue to live a fulfilled life, then that is a life well lived. We’re only graced with a certain number of years on this planet, and when we make the most of those years, living in Loving energy, we bring forth a sense of gratitude and appreciation. From this comes the essence of joy, which is communicated through compassion and kindness to others. Through this kindness and compassion, Love abounds.
In this way, something that may start out as a nihilistic pondering (what’s the point?) can be transformed into an open and eager view of life, full of excitement and opportunity. When we live through such a Loving frame, we have nothing to fear, and in our last breath, our Love transcends us and continues on. Think of a funeral, when people speak of how the deceased person made them so happy, brought them out of sadness, or was generous and compassionate. Funeral speeches are rarely about how much money the person had or what kind of car they drove.
We have the choice to live life to the fullest as well as we possibly can from moment to moment, in spite of fear, challenge, tragedy, and trauma. These are all inevitable parts of life, but Love goes beyond them. When we have these types of challenges, through living in connection with ourselves, something greater than ourselves, and others, we continue to move forward and be a channel of positive energy. Not even death can stop the Love that flows from us—it is carried on through our loved ones and the people who we have connected with on this earth, and then through the ones they touch with that energy. Now, that is a beautiful life.
Much Love,
Noel Neu, The Songwriting Therapist™