LETTER 22
There are people who do not live their present life; it is as if they were preparing themselves, with all their zeal, to live some other life, but not this one. And while they do this, time goes by and is lost.
—ANTIPHON (FIFTH CENTURY BC)
You are going to die, Walker.
That’s a strange way to start a letter, isn’t it? I can hear you saying, “Jeez, G, thanks for the reminder.”
But why are you reading these letters at all? Why worry about building resilience and creating happiness now? Why not put it off until tomorrow, or next week, or next year?
You know why: because your time is limited. It’s precious because it’s finite. You don’t know how much you’ll get, so you know to appreciate what you’ve got.
And it’s in this way that death—the source of our greatest fears, the fear behind all fears—provides the urgency behind our greatest efforts.
None of this is news, Walker. We know we’re going to die. But we’re pretty darned good at forgetting it. Forget too long and you can spend a lifetime postponing and procrastinating. You can put off the life you want to live until you wake up to find that it’s too late. You study but never act. You plan but never travel. You think it, but never tell anyone you love them.
As Antiphon said, there are people (and we’re all like this sometimes) who simply forget to live their present life. Antiphon died two thousand five hundred years ago. People have been procrastinating for a while, Walker. But you don’t have to.
—2—
If it’s important that we don’t forget the fact of our death, it’s also important that we don’t fixate on it.
The best analogy I’ve ever heard about this says that death is like the sun. It infuses every part of our lives, but it doesn’t make sense to stare at it.
The urgency that comes from the limited span of our lives pushes us to find meaning in the time we have. But fearing death, obsessing over it, staring directly at it, blinds us to the possibilities of living.
The resilient person learns to live with the knowledge of death without being overcome by it.
How do you do that? Remember how, in the letter on practice, I said that you can practice anything? That includes death.
—3—
How many guys do you know who said this about combat: “I don’t know if I’ll ever feel that alive again”?
Any honest account of the experience of combat has to make room for the experience—even the joy—of absolute engagement, the electric sensation of knowing that everything matters.
A lot of ancient philosophers recognized that through disciplined reflection on death, we bring urgency and vividness and meaning to the days that we live.
They didn’t “practice for death” because they were gloomy, or morbid, or because they wanted everyone to appreciate how “deep” they were. They did it because they wanted to live more fully.
As usual, Seneca captured the idea clearly: “At the moment we go to sleep, let us say, in joy and gaiety: ‘I have lived. I have traveled the path which Fortune assigned to me.’ If a god gives us the next day as a bonus, let us receive it with joy . . . Whoever has said to himself ‘I have lived’ can arise each day to an unexpected gift. Hurry up and live, and consider each day as a completed life.”
I love that. Hurry up and live!
Keep in mind that in Seneca’s time, if your healthy thirty-five-year-old friend got a cold, he might well die. If his toothache worsened and his mouth swelled, he might well die. If he had a cut that got infected, he might well die.
So: hurry up and live!
My boxing coach Earl Blair used to do this. If at the end of practice I said to Earl, “See you tomorrow,” he’d say, “See you tomorrow, if the Lord spares me.” If I dropped him off at his house and said, “I’ll see you Monday,” he’d say, “See you Monday, if the Lord spares me.”
Every time a plan was made, Earl would say, “If the Lord spares me.” If you asked him about this, he’d tell you that it was, in part, a way of being respectful to God: “My Father owns every second, and he’ll take me when he wants to.”
It was also a way of practicing death—of reminding yourself and others around you that your time is limited.
Reflecting like this has a way of changing the way you see the world. Lucretius, a Roman poet who lived a bit before Seneca, wrote that all of the miracles of the natural world—everything we take for granted like spoiled children—would awe and stun us if we could see them again for the first time: “If all these objects suddenly surged forth to the eyes of mortals, what could be found that was more wonderful than this totality, whose existence the human mind could not have dared to imagine?”
Children sometimes see with eyes like this. And we can too, if we remember that our eyes will one day close for good.
Think about it. When do you see things most vividly and love things most intensely? Often it’s when you first discover them—or when they’re about to be taken away.
We talked before about mental rehearsal and visualization. Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius believed in the importance of mentally rehearsing their own deaths. They recognized the role of fortune enough to know that it was impossible to predict the exact time or place they would die. At the same time, they knew that we can prepare for death, as we can prepare for any fearful thing. For centuries, wise people have tried to follow their example.
In 1569, Michel de Montaigne was a local lord in western France. He’d read the classics deeply, but his political responsibilities kept him too busy to pursue his passion for study. That winter, he was out for a ride when another horse smashed into his. He was thrown high into the air and then crashed down onto the road.
To the servants who tried to carry his broken body back home, Montaigne seemed to be a man in unbearable pain, moaning and coughing up blood. But from the inside, it all felt remarkably painless. He later wrote, “It seemed to me that my life was hanging only by the tip of my lips; I closed my eyes in order, it seemed to me, to help push [life] out, and took pleasure in growing languid and letting myself go.” At what looked to be the end of his life, he discovered (in the words of his recent biographer, Sarah Bakewell) that “death could have a friendly face.”
But Montaigne recovered, and went on to live twenty-three more years. He retired from his political work and spent much of the rest of his days in his library, a tower room lined with a thousand books, where he wrote the essays that made him one of the most revolutionary writers to ever live. And it might not surprise you that he spent a lot of that time thinking about death—how it was that coming so close to death had cured him of his fear, and how the rest of us might cure ourselves in a similar way.
“To begin to strip [death] of its greatest advantage against us,” he wrote, “let us take an entirely different way from the usual one. Let us rid it of its strangeness, come to know it, get used to it . . . At the stumbling of a horse, the fall of a tile, the slightest pin prick, let us promptly chew on this: Well, what if it were death itself?”
Does that sound morbid to you? Montaigne didn’t think so: “Premeditation of death is premeditation of freedom. He who has learned how to die has unlearned how to be a slave.”
In accepting that we are going to die, we gain a tremendous power over ourselves.
Like all fears, the fear of death does its worst work when it knocks around in our mind. Fear likes to lurk in shadow. When Montaigne thinks “What if it were death itself?” and Earl says “If the Lord spares me,” they put the bright prospect of death right in front of their eyes. Over time, they become comfortable with the idea that they too will one day do the one thing we all have to do.
—4—
And while we’re thinking about death, Walker, let’s take a moment to think and talk about how we remember those who have died.
Pericles was Greece’s greatest statesman, and one of his responsibilities was to speak in memory of those who died in battle. His speech over the Athenian dead is still read and admired to this day. One line in particular stands out to me: “Heroes have the whole earth for their tomb . . . There is enshrined in every breast a record unwritten with no tablet to preserve it, except that of the heart.”
What lives on is not what is engraved in stone monuments, but what we have woven into the lives of others. Those who have lived with us become a part of us.
We honor the dead by living their values. Through our efforts, we ensure that the good things they stood for continue to stand even when they are gone. Our actions become a living memorial to their memory.
Your life carries forward the story of all those who shaped it for the good and who are now gone. And you can live in such a way that those after you will be proud to weave your life into their own.