The 50th Law - 50 Cent [93]
If we were to give ourselves up to these two trains of thought—the pain and the meaninglessness—we would almost be paralyzed into inaction or driven to suicide. But consciously and unconsciously we invented two solutions to this awareness. The most primitive was the creation of the concept of an afterlife that would alleviate our fears and give our actions in the present much meaning. The second solution—the one that has come to dominate our thinking in the present—is to attempt to forget our mortality and bury ourselves in the moment. This means actively repressing any thought of death itself. To aid in this, we distract our minds with routines and banal concerns. Occasionally we are reminded of our fear when someone close to us dies, but generally we have developed the habit of drowning it out with our daily concerns.
The problem, however, is that this repression is not really effective. We generally become conscious of our mortality at the age of four or five. At that moment, such a thought had a profound impact on our psyches. We associated it with feelings of separation from loved ones, with any kind of darkness, chaos, or the unknown. And it troubled us deeply. This fear has sat inside of us ever since. It is impossible to completely eradicate or avoid such an immense thought; it sneaks in through another door, seeps into our behavior in ways we cannot even begin to imagine.
Death represents the ultimate reality—a limit to our days and efforts in a definitive fashion. We have to face it alone and leave behind all that we know and love—a complete separation. It is associated with physical and mental pain. To repress the thought, we must then avoid anything that reminds us of death. We therefore indulge in all kinds of fantasies and illusions, struggling to keep out of our minds any kind of hard and unavoidable reality. We cling to jobs, relationships, and comfortable positions, all to elude the feeling of separation. We grow overly conservative because any kind of risk might entail adversity, failure, or pain. We keep ourselves surrounded by others to drown out the thought of our essential aloneness. We may not be consciously aware of this, but in the end we expend an intense amount of psychic energy in these repressions. The fear of death does not go away; it merely returns in smaller anxieties and habits that limit our enjoyment of life.
There is a third and fearless way, however, to deal with mortality. From the moment we are born, we carry inside ourselves our death. It is not some outside event that ends our days but something within us. We have only so many days to live. This amount of time is something unique to us; it is ours alone, our only true possession. If we run away from this reality by avoiding the thought of death, we are really running away from ourselves. We are denying the one thing that cannot be denied; we are living a lie. The fearless approach requires that you accept the fact that you have only so much time to live, and that life itself inevitably involves levels of pain and separation. By embracing this, you embrace life itself and accept everything about it. Depending on a belief in an afterlife or drowning yourself in the moment to avoid pain is to despise reality, which is to despise life itself.
When you choose to affirm life by confronting your mortality, everything changes. What matters to you now is to live your days well, as fully as possible. You could choose to do this by pursuing endless pleasures, but nothing becomes boring more quickly than having to always search for new distractions. If attaining certain goals becomes your greatest source of pleasure, then your days are filled with purpose and direction, and whenever death comes, you have no regrets. You do not fall into nihilistic thinking about the futility of it all, because that is a supreme waste of the brief time you have been given. You now have a way