People with far higher IQs than mine have wrestled with death all through history. Ancient peoples reached states of consciousness most of us will never touch, and they left behind stories about death that may be far more developed than anything I've got. The libraries are full of it. Every religion, every philosophy, every mystic with a following has taken a swing at the question. And here's the thing that always stops me: for all that thinking, who among them actually conquered the fear? Who died easy? But I have the ultimate tactic, and it's almost embarrassingly simple. Instead of thinking about death, I say there is only the present moment. There is only the next breath.
When the mind says, oh God, what is death, is it final, do I lose everything, I catch it. I realize in that very moment that I've drifted out of the present. The fear of death is never happening now. It's always a thought about later, dressed up as an emergency. And the moment I see that, the mind fights back hard. Wait, come back, let's talk about this, let's analyze it, let's figure it out. Let's read a book, go to a seminar, study the philosophy, comb through the religious texts. The mind wants to solve death like it's a math problem, because solving it feels safer than sitting with it. But it can't be solved. They all claim the answer, shelves and shelves of answers, and yet who among them is not afraid?
We're designed with a few strong instincts, and one of them is the fear of injury, disease, and death. It's a good thing. It kept our ancestors alive long enough to make us. But that instinct has no real job beyond the practical one. It's there to remind me I'm not invincible, that I should look both ways, that I have to take care of this body. That's it. It was never meant to run my whole inner life. When it stops being a quick warning and becomes a constant dread, it has slipped out of its lane. It's no longer protecting me. It's just torturing me.
So here's what I do instead of drowning in the sorrow of it. I just keep being a good human. I keep gathering information, stacking it up, taking my painful moments and turning them into lessons that bring me some peace. That reframes the whole thing. It means I didn't suffer in this life for nothing. Every hard thing I lived through becomes material, something I can shape and hand to someone else. What I worked to learn, I can give away. And that's the move that quietly answers the fear without ever fighting it directly: instead of taking from this world, instead of depleting it on my way out, I can add something to it. A person busy adding doesn't have much room left over for dread.
Yes, my time will come, and most likely it'll be gradual. I'll have to face the slow handover, going from a guy who could sprint for hours on a field chasing a frisbee to a guy who moves a little slower, and then slower than that. I've made peace with it. It doesn't matter. I come back to the breath. And when my time really comes, when it's actually here, I plan to ask myself one honest question. Did you do your work? And I believe I'll be able to say yes. Then I'll come back to the breath one more time and say what I always say. It doesn't matter. There's just now. There's just now.
Oh wait, I can hear you already, what else can I read to get more answers? Just point me to the good stuff. There is none. I'm sorry. There are only poems and intellectual concepts, and some of them are beautiful, but a poem is not an exit. And please, don't get swept up by the people who tell you they traveled to the other side, came back, and saw the white light and the tunnel and the warmth. Maybe they did. Maybe they didn't. Maybe that light was a brain low on oxygen, nerves firing their last show. It doesn't matter which, and here's why: it isn't your present moment. You don't experience it. It's a postcard from someone else's trip. So what difference does it make to you, right now, breathing, alive?
And if life gets too scary, and you decide you need a concept of God, you need the Lord, you need the symbols and the rituals to get through the night, that's fine. It's more than fine. I'm not here to take anyone's comfort away. But remember what a symbol actually is. A symbol only points at the thing. It is not the thing. You can stare at the Om symbol all day, feel a wave of peace every time you see it, hang it on every wall, and still never have touched what Om actually means, because that you have to experience for yourself, in your own body, in your own silence. The symbol is a finger pointing at the moon. Don't fall in love with the finger. And here's the one that gets me: your own body is a symbol too. It's the symbol of your life, this beautiful, specific, fading thing. When you die, it's gone, and the symbol goes with it. So don't mistake the symbol for what it points to here either.
In the meantime, while you're still here with breath in your lungs, what can you actually do that's great? It's so much smaller and more available than people think. Can you breathe, really breathe, ten slow ones through the nose? Can you plant a tree you'll never sit under? Can you teach a child how to peel an orange, or slice an avocado without cutting their hand? That's it. That's the whole assignment. That's good present-moment stuff, and it's the closest thing to an answer about death that I've ever found.