Two Certainties In Life
In one of my previous flats, I’d put up a skull wall sticker, the one you used to get from IKEA. The sticker was a take on the elaborate face decoration adorned by people during the Mexican festival of Día de Los Muertos, or Day of the Dead.
Around the sticker, I’d added colourful butterflies. For me, the combination of the skull and butterflies symbolises renewal. It also represents the duality, wholeness, and completeness of life and death and the beauty and serenity of existence. It’s a similar reason why I have an Ouroboros tattoo. It expresses the unity of everything, material and spiritual. Everything is transient, continually changing form, in an eternal cycle of destruction and re-creation.
We are two days away from easing some lockdown measures, which brought to mind something I’d read from Rich Litvin. In his article, he states that there are only two certainties in life: firstly, we know we’re going to die, and secondly, we don’t know when that will be. If you thought the second is taxes, you, like me, are wrong!
We don’t talk about death, much less about the possibility of it happening, but it is an inevitability of being born. There is nothing we can do to change this fact. We may be aware of this, but what can we do about it.
How would you want to spend your time doing?
Litvin then goes on to ask this: imagine if you knew when you would die; tomorrow, a month, or even a year from now.
What if you knew you had many years left – 5, 10, 30 years, or more? How would you spend that time? How would you live differently? How would you want to spend your time doing? What would you not do? We can look back at our lives and regret the missed opportunities. The chances we didn’t take. Words we spoke or didn’t speak when the time came—times when we were overwhelmed by our overthinking and anxiety for our future. Regret is sorrow for a past potential that we never experienced, brought into an imagined present.
With our world seems chaotic and uncertain, we can do little to control events outside of ourselves. It seems obvious, yet we can still feel discouraged about what is happening around us.
Yet, there is still something we can and must do. Live your life. We have more choices than we think. We can accept the situation we’re in, change the circumstances, or change ourselves.
What is it that you’d like to do but haven’t? What have you left unsaid? What positive impact do you want to make in the lives of others? How do you want to be remembered? Despite appearances, this is a time of great opportunity. It is why my mission is to help people reconnect to themselves, to others, and the world around them.
Think about what is most important for YOU, then get the help you need to make that a reality.
To your life!
Joseph
