Twenty-One: Mortality

This will be one of the few non-nerd posts that I publish. Enjoy.

Today, I was having breakfast with my family at a diner. As I left, an elderly man fell at the front door of the diner. We helped him up, and, with difficulty, got him to a chair to sit down. As I left, I looked back at him. He was sitting in the chair, eyes wide open, looking around. He looked scared. Maybe terrified is a better word to use.

I thought about this for a little while. Why was he so scared? I think that, while it may be rude of me to assume, he was scared because he felt his body fail him, and this may have not been the first time that it happened. I don’t want to get into his business, so I won’t talk much about him in particular. But as I left, the look of terror on his face had me thinking about mortality as well.

At some point in my life, and in your life, we will be in the exact same situation as this man was. It may not be the exact environment, circumstances, or situation, but nonetheless, it will have the exact same undertone: we will be face to face with the fact that we will soon die, whether that be in a year, a couple months, tomorrow, or a few seconds. It is natural and human nature to be scared of death. After all, we live and are inclined to thrive just so that we don’t die. Life exists and continues to exist because it rejects and continues to drag out the reality of death for as long as possible. Put simply, I think that we live so that we don’t die. But the time will come, and we fear it.

Something way scarier than death is regret at death. When I reach my final moments, the last thing I want is to look back at my life and be disappointed. This is one of the reasons that I make these posts. They keep me honest, chronicle interesting (not really) things that happen, and give me more of a reason to keep doing things that make the most of life. As the span of time of a life gets longer, the time runs faster, so it’s easy to lose sight of important things and then realize it way too late. A primary goal of my life is to not have regrets of things that I didn’t do. When I realize that there are only months, days, or even seconds left of my life, I hope to look back and be happy with how I lived it and what I did in it. Maybe this blog (even if it’s all nerd shit) will be proof of that?