Death. As cheerful subject as it is, we do our best to ignore it. Here is what I scribbled on my birthday about death.
Life comes with only two certainties. Birth. Death. That’s all. Any other thing, we can never be sure of whether it will manifest or not. Everything else is uncertain. We have no guarantee of our next breath. Birth, was all done. Death, is on its way to us, and won’t miss its arrival time.
We tend to live our lives ignoring the only certainty we have. When we do think of death, we think of it with haste and perhaps fear.
Most of us spend our lives trying to make certainties of uncertainties. We want to make sure we will get married and have kids. We want to know when we will earn money, have big success, close a deal, move to a nicer house, have romance, prove others that we made it. We want to know that these things are on its way, so we can be happy now. Oh dear, there is no way to know if any of these are on its way. No doubt, we know one guest is on its way! No matter how much we like that guest. No matter how ready we feel for it to show up.
Futile attempts of transforming uncertainty to certainty do not bring the joy we seek. Because they are futile! We get anxious. “When?!!” There is no answer. We get frustrated. We go into depression. We try to escape the reality (that there is no way to know for example if we will meet our soul mate with whom we will eventually have a bunch of wonderful kids) with addictive behavior. Alcohol, drugs, food, television watching, video gaming, social media time killing, etc.
While we want to ensure if we will have the things we want one day, so that we can be happy, we miss the chance to be happy in the present moment.
There is no way of knowing anything that is to come our way. So why spend our life chasing a delusional form of happiness? Why waste this life we have, like a hamster on a wheel assuming we are reaching somewhere, the land of certainty and happiness.
I believe there is actually a land of certainty and happiness but it is not where we are looking for it.
I believe that the shortcut to certainty and happiness is embracing the certainty of death, accepting it, and loving it. After that, everything else falls into their place. We never need to seek joy trying to transform the uncertainties into certainties, we already have joy authentically embracing the one certainty in life.
While others’ death is emotionally painful for us, ours is not. It just is. On its journey, our soul sheds its body and moves on. No body, no pain. Yes soul, yes love.
What if the guest knocks on our door too early? Well, we won’t know, will we, until that very moment, whenever that is? And we sure won’t be here to grieve our own death. So, why would we have any problem with it? We are not passing on with tears for the promotion we were expecting to get. Death already is done at that moment. We were here. We are there. We were in pain. We no longer are.
One way to embrace death with love is to see it as a passing to another dimension, rather than as an end to life. This life is but one stop on our soul’s long journey. We go through life times, seeking more soul growth, getting closer to love, our ultimate home. We picked our lessons for this life before this incarnation. We wanted to learn forgiveness in this life, so we ran into too many a..holes. We wanted to learn patience, so we ran into so many red lights – literally and metaphorically. You get the idea. Hopefully, we also got to know, accept and love ourselves. If not, no problem, we will be back. With every life, every growth, we are more home, embracing oneness and love.
The shortcut – accepting and loving that one certainty in our life – will take a lot of suffering off us. We create much pain and suffering worrying about what the future awaits for us. Yet we already know the future. We die! Hooray, I know what lies ahead of me! I can now accept all the uncertainties of life, and fall in love with this life I now have - once and for all.
I am no longer limiting myself to the future I am trying to foresee. Instead, I am opening myself up to the limitless miracles the universe has to offer between now and my last breath. I can be anything, much better than anything my control-freak third dimensional consciousness can envision. Only when I embrace death, I can be fully here now - not giving a damn about the future. I am enjoying the breath I am taking right now. I am here - and I am.
P.S. Embracing death with love signifies the natural timing of our death. There is no effort to rush it or delay it. It is the joy of ultimate surrendering to the Infinite Divine Consciousness and its precise orchestration of lives. It is knowing that the perfect time to pass is when the guest knocks on the door.