When I went through undergrad for my BA in psychology I took a class on death. More specifically how different cultures and populations view death. I read case study after case study on people on their death beds and what they said or did from their loved one’s perspectives.
So many people said “I wish I had more time”. This was something that was stated over and over across different countries, religions, and even ages. Another widely said thing was “I wish I spent more time doing the things I loved”.
What I read when I read those, was that people were at the end of their lives and WISHING for something different. They wished that they lived a different life and now that their time has run out, they got sad about it. That alone is sad.
To continue, different cultures and populations had different viewpoints on death. Some welcome death, some fear death, some are indifferent about it. It makes me think, am I afraid of death? Do I welcome death? Am I indifferent? I feel like I have been through different stages of my life where I didn’t care if I died and I’m at a stage now where I am scared to die.
Not scared from the “I don’t know what is going to happen” viewpoint, but from the “my kids are young and need their mother” standpoint. I don’t want to die right now because I want to be a mother, I want to see my kids grow up and start their own families. And I want to see and do all that in the flesh.
I want to feel it with human senses and perceptions. I want to touch and smell and see and hear and BE with my babies and their babies. I wouldn’t get the same experience if I were to drop dead today.
But I’ll tell you what. I do NOT want to get to the end of my life and WISH that I had more time. I don’t want to WISH that I did more things that I loved. I want to do all of that every day.
I feel like I never really pay much mind to the fact that I am going to die one day or pay mind to how I am going to die…but when I do go down that rabbit hole, I can kind of freak myself out lol!
It makes me really want to be more present and just fucking enjoy life man. Not sit around and just exist. It makes me want to try to new things and heal myself so I can fucking be happy and peaceful throughout my days.
I read somewhere once that “people with PTSD and severe trauma don’t heal to be able to handle the trauma, they heal so they can handle the joy”.
And holy fucking moly did that vibrate my soul.
Think about that…
Joy is hard to handle because it is unfamiliar if you’re used to chronic turmoil and trauma. You don’t know how to experience joy, you just know how to handle shit storm after shit storm. So when a joyous experience does happen, you feel like you don’t deserve them or that the rug is about to get swept out from under you at any time.
I remember one Christmas, after my first daughter was born, it was our first Christmas at home as a family of 3 now. I was so fucking depressed that it was a beautiful morning that I couldn’t even enjoy my firstborn’s first Christmas.
I was triggered the whole fucking morning and even cried alone in the bathroom at one point.
Triggered because Christmas was always a horrible experience for me growing up. So this is where handling a joyous moment can be destroyed by trauma.
That was a tangent unrelated to the death topic, but definitely needed to be processed.
Back to wanting to experience and live each day to the fullest, as cliche as that sounds. But think about that, really fucking think about that.
We all think we have so much fucking time here, but we don’t. Time is man made so we can simplify the un-simplifiable universe. We are all on this one long track jetting us towards the end of our “time” and what we do along the way matters most.
Who we become on the jet. What we learn. What we create. How we impact the world in a positive way. How we contribute to our species.
There’s so much good we can do every single day. There’s so much connection we can make with Earth and everyone and everything we share the Earth with.
Even connections we can make with our creator.
Even ourselves.
I refuse to get to the end of my life and wish. Even if that day were tomorrow. I will know that today I did something kind for someone else, I held and loved on my children, I connected with nature and my creator, and I tried to move with love in every thing I did.
Imagine if I could do that every day? Would that leave me satisfied at the end?
Words, from my heart. 