Do You Dread Your Days?

How many times have you heard, “I hate Mondays.” “I am not looking forward to going back to work tomorrow.” “I can’t wait for the weekend.” “I hate my job.” For me, it is all too often. On a recent Monday morning after a long weekend, I asked someone how they were doing, and they replied, “I am so tired; I wish it were still the weekend.” Another person said they dreaded getting out of bed that morning.

Since I facilitate people’s creation of a life they love, I am disappointed that men and women either choose work that doesn’t excite them or decide to give negative meaning to their jobs or careers. If you wake up each morning anxious, fearful or discouraged about your day ahead, it is time to change something.

Contemplating Death

So today, I would like you to consider ‘death’ the most fantastic teacher in your life, at least for the next 15 minutes. Please stick with me on this. It is not nearly as morbid as it might sound.

Have any of you read The Untethered Soul by Michael Singer? Well, in the past few years, I would pick it up to read, and I could never get into it. I guess I wasn’t in a place where I could absorb the concepts Singer describes in the book.

Is there anyone out there like me? I would read two or three paragraphs, maybe two or three pages. Even though my eyes were seeing the words, my brain would drift off to riveting thoughts like, oh, I need to remember to get trash bags next time I go to the store, or wow, some popcorn and a glass of wine sound good right now, or I forgot to tell my brother something when I spoke to him on the phone yesterday. Has this ever happened to any of you?

Talk about not being present. Ugh.

I picked the book up a few months ago and started rereading it for the third time. And this time, the words resonated with me. I thought, holy shit, these are the most amazing words to hit a piece of paper in the history of time. I read and pondered and highlighted as I went along.

And then, I got to chapter 17.   The title of the chapter is Contemplating Death.

Singer suggests that no person or situation could ever teach us as much as Death has to teach us.

Think about it; we will all breathe our last breath at some point. And if we are wise and willing students of Death, we know it could happen at any moment.

And I say that it is wise to wholeheartedly embrace the reality and inevitability and the unpredictability of Death.

And so, why should we consider Death a valuable reminder to live at our highest level?

Let’s consider our loved ones. It is easy to take them for granted. We rely on them to be there for us and to accept us, even when we are grumpy and treat them unkindly.

Think about your conversations and the people or things you plug into that allow stress into your life.

Imagine This

Now imagine this. The angel of Death visits you tonight and says, guess what, you have one week to live. Then what?

What would your conversations be like?

Would you complain about the things you have been complaining about?

Would you keep holding those grudges?

Would your have-to’s turn into get-to’s?

Would your need-to’s turn into want-to’s?

Death is not a morbid thought. Death is the most fantastic teacher in life.

Who lives with this level of awareness?

I predict that if you ask genuinely awakened people how they would live their last week, they would say that nothing would change. Why? Because they are living their lives fully. They are not making compromises or playing games with themselves.

We must be willing to look at what it would be like if Death were staring us in the face.

Embracing Truth

The beauty of embracing profound truths is that you don’t have to change your life. You change how you live your life.

Let’s take a straightforward example. You’ve walked outside thousands of times, but how many times have you truly appreciated it?

Imagine a person in a hospital bed who has just been told that they have a week to live. They look at their doctor and say, Can I walk outside? Can I look at the sky one more time?

If it were raining outside, they would want to smell, see, and feel the rain one more time. This would be a precious thing for them. But most of us don’t want to feel the rain. What do we do? We run and cover up and complain because it is raining.

I observe that so many of us fear Death because we have projected ourselves so far into the future that we can’t just be here and now and live life. We must understand that our attempt to get extraordinary experiences from life makes us miss the experience of life. If we are so busy trying to get something, we will miss the slice we are experiencing. Think about it: we get in our cars and drive from here to there, but we don’t see anything.

Why? Because we aren’t present. We are busy thinking about what we are going to do next. We are a week, a month, even a year ahead of ourselves. When we do this, we aren’t living life. We are living in our minds. In the past few years, we have all heard the term “mindfulness.” I think we need to change it to “mindlessness” instead of having a full mind; it seems it would be better to have less in our minds.

Letting Go

We must let go of the scared part that keeps us from living fully. You know that you will die, so be willing to say what needs to be told and do what needs to be done. Be ready to be fully present without fearing what will happen next.

Think about it like this. Life is your vocation, and your interaction with it is your most important relationship. What gives life meaning is our willingness to live it. It isn’t any particular event. It is the willingness to experience life’s events fully.

Living fully means letting each moment fill us completely, allowing life to touch us deeply. There is no moment that can’t do that. One of the tenets that I live by is to allow every experience to be a gift, even the things that feel awful. Embrace the experience of it.

Don’t be afraid of Death. Instead, let it free you. Let it be a reminder to live life fully. Experience the life that is happening for you. Appreciate every single moment you are given.