1. Death pushes us to act. When death will find us, we do not know. This pushes us to act upon what is most important in the present, the only moment we know we have, as the future is an unknowable question mark.
2. Death gives time value. In economics class, I learned value was set by supply and demand. Without death, time would be in endless supply and despite utmost demand, would have no value. Death limits our supply of time, inverting its value from worthless to priceless.
3. Death provides contrast. Thanks to darkness, we can grasp the notion of light. In the same way, death provides contrast to life; as you read these words, at the bare minimum, you are alive! This is one thing we can always be thankful for, one thing to keep us going regardless of our lot in life.
4. Death kills ego. As death implies the end of the ego, it has a way of suppressing the desires of the ego in the present. This makes room for wants of the soul: things like love, curiosity, and wonder.
5. Death exposes false importance. False importance, from fame to fancy things to revenge, dissolves in the face of death.
6. Death is a permission slip. One hundred years from now, essentially everyone alive at this moment will be gone and forgotten. All expectations will perish much sooner—not a single one has ever outlasted the person who held it.
7. Death lessens fear. Fear can be belittled by death. From public speaking to social anxiety to a leap of faith, when held near the thought of death, all fears are minimized.
8. Death makes anything sweeter. Like a movie you can only watch once, every experience is heightened by the limitations placed upon it. With only so many goes at anything, we cherish each of them.
9. Death reminds us to breathe (and laugh). Time will wash us and all we do away, which helps us take life less seriously and find humor in even our most vital struggles.
10. Death maintains mystery in life. We view the world more objectively than any generation to proceed us, which results in a lack of mystery and wonder in our lives. No matter how much faith we put in our four-dimension bound, five senses processed through our subconscious driven psyche to objectively interpret reality, death remains beyond the grasp of those senses, preserving a profound sense of mystery in life.
To summarize: at the expense of quantity, death increases our quality of life.
However, in burying the thought of death and thinking as if we'll live forever, we bury death's extraordinary benefits. To reflect upon our mortality is to refresh the positives of life's greatest negative. We don't even have to remember how or why death improves our quality of life, death's contemplation just does, applying itself to whatever is on our minds.
By Ethan Maurice | February 27, 2018 Read full article
There's a Latin phrase, “memento mori,” which translates in English to “remember death” that has been associated with the practice of contemplating one's mortality for thousands of years. Visiting my sister's college in Maine this fall, I had the extraordinary luck of timing a temporary memento mori art exhibit entitled, The Ivory Mirror: The Art of Mortality in Renaissance Europe. I wandered around for a long while, considering the varying uses of remembering death across the ages while inspecting these mortality reminding art pieces.
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