°
We all have transferrence objects to make our life meaningful when faced with the inevitability of death.
This can be your shoe collection, religion, or culture. We transfer our insecurity into external stabilizers and signifiers, proclaiming loudly our significance against the inevitable.
°
If you want attention from a certain audience, put energy into that space. If you want freedom from catering to other people’s acceptance maintain your independence.
The trade-off is for recognition, which is how we tend to measure success, but external validation is a fraught and fickle path.
Today they love you, tomorrow they don’t.
°
"He who dies with the most toys wins" is a child-like sentiment, and yet there is comfort in the physical items that surround us. They offer a concrete means to validate our place in the world, which delivers tangible stability.
When do we graduate from childhood’s external value measures to the maturation of internal worth? Hopefully, before we die.
°
When most of us die there will be nothing epic about it. In the grand scheme of things only a handful of people will notice or care, and only for a few years. Rather than being depressing, what does this free you up to do? To become? What exhilarating chances can you take?
°
It seems a constant erasure of our past is buried under new scribblings.
If we are driftingly content to dismiss our own lived experience (that is to change our memories to fit the new lines or repress the dissident noise) then we are not only shaped by history and culture, but we fortify the very shape that writes us out of existence.
°
You are always older and younger: forgetting either shortens your life.
Your body is more fragile, your will gives out quicker, but going into overdrive (overcoming) blocks your child-like curiosity, humor, and empathy… for yourself.We often embody the wrong age at the wrong time.
°
Do not forget, amidst your self-becoming, the foundational mystery that you are alive and aware in a bizarre universe. Ground yourself in the realization that to “realize” is lucky.
To die is lucky: in one sense because you ever lived, and in another because you are not immortal.
“Has any one supposed it lucky to be born?/I hasten to inform him or her it is just as lucky to die, and I know it.” ~ Walt Whitman
