How to defy death
NOTE: This is an old post of mine I've just found... Death is such a theme in my life (it's even in the Secret Language of Birthdays – a book I was given in my teens. According to the book, I'm born on the Day of the Dark Pragmatist, and it says that death will weave itself through everything I do...)
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How to defy death
(OR: ‘Why you must die so you can live’)
I came close to dying when I was 11. Death got a good look at me and knows my face. In three days time, I will go to a neurosurgeon – 30 years after that first life-altering experience – to find out what an ‘irregular’ brain MRI means.
Death has been a theme all my life. And I thank it. It has galvanised me, from an early age, to respect the big picture I intuitively saw when the peers and adults around me couldn't.
But I haven’t always kept the focus. At various times, I’ve been derailed by social convention and peer pressure. And paid the price – with anxiety, anger, and (irony of ironies) an all-consuming fear of death.
Because I’m human. We’re all human. We all think we have time. But, that’s the tragedy; we don’t have time – not in this human body, anyway.
This false thinking leads to complacency; we delay until ‘one day’ and avoid doing what we want to do, being who we know we are meant to be…
Until.
It is no coincidence that the most common regret of those on their deathbed is: “I wish I had lived the life I wanted to live, and not the life others wanted of me.”
We have one life, one life in which to live it, and once we’re gone, we’re gone for eternity.
But, there is a way to defy death. It means risking it all. It means walking through the valley of the shadow of death – and coming out the other side, not with an easier life, but with the knowledge that we are ourselves.
What this takes:
It means becoming intimately, painfully aware of the price you pay to maintain your status (and the status quo) and the critical importance of dying to yourself in order to be born as the person you are meant to be (to die so that you can live).
If you try to maintain your status, the status quo, when your life is no longer true for yourself, you will eventually have to fall apart. Some of us have a higher tolerance for this than others, and can hold out longer, but eventually something will happen that will help you shed your need to hold onto status, security and safety – because there is a certain desire or yearning that is even deeper than your need to protect your status.
And what will push you to this threshold? A crisis. Sometimes it creeps up; sometimes it comes without warning.
Divorce, illness, death of a loved one, a significant date…
If you are ready, you can use this hard surface – this life circumstance – and fling the husk of your current facade against it so you get hulled and the seeds fly out.
If you are lucky, it happens sooner rather than later.
The bad news. Your life will not be easier after this. It will be harder.
There is always something that has to be given, something that has to be let go of, a risk that has to be taken – so that you can be yourself. You will have to burn the old you to reveal the new. Not a comfortable experience at all.
You will return into the world, where no-one understands what you have been through. It will be brutal. You will not like anything that you used to love. And you will grieve because of it.
But it will be better.
Because, when you are on your death-bed, you will die a better death (no regrets) because you will have been here, if just once… been here utterly and completely. This is how you defy death.
So, questions for you:
• Is there something you want to die to?
• Is there something you want to burn or bury?
• What are you ready to create?
• Who is it that you yearn to be? Who have you been since before you can remember, who are you in your bones, what you were born as – yet have yet to be, to manifest, to live out?
YOU know when it is time to give up your status, your success, your security in order to die to what no longer serves you. You know if there is an urgency; before it’s the end of your time on the planet. I can’t tell you this. But I CAN show you how to navigate the journey, because I am a death defier.
Here’s to the death-defiers.