A life oblivious of death and a life conscious of the hourly approach of death are two completely different states.
The more life moves from the material sphere into the spiritual, the less frightening death becomes. For a human being who lives a wholly spiritual life, this fear does not exist.
When you are firmly convinced and remember that at any moment you may have to discard your outer shell, your body, i.e. to die, it is easier for you to act justly and in accordance with the truth, easier to submit to your fate. Think only of not straying away from the truth in every task that lies ahead of you today and of dutifully bearing the things you will now face. Live this way and you will not only be undisturbed by people’s gossips, rumors and attacks, but you will even stop thinking about them, and all the misfortunes that may befall you will seem to you insignificant, because by living this way all your desires will merge into one—to serve the will of God. And that is something that you can always do.
— After Marcus Aurelius
Think more often about death and live as if you know that you must soon die.
Whenever you have doubts about the best course of action, imagine that you will die by nightfall, and your doubts will be resolved at once, it will immediately become clear to you which course of action is your duty, and which is guided by personal desire.
The thought of approaching death orders all our deeds by the degree of their true importance for our life. A person sentenced to immediate execution will not care about growing and protecting his fortune, nor about building a good reputation, nor about the triumph of his people over others, nor about the discovery of a new planet, etc., but moments before his death he will try to comfort someone who is upset, will help an old man who had fallen get back on his feet, will bandage a wound, will fix a child’s toy…
I love my garden, I love to read books, I love to caress children. Death deprives me of this, which is why I do not want to die, and I am afraid of death.
It may be that the whole of my life is composed of such transient, worldly desires and their satisfaction. If so, then I cannot but be afraid of what brings these desires to an end. But if these desires and their satisfaction have changed within me and have been replaced by a different desire—the desire to fulfill God’s will, to surrender myself to him the way I am right now, and in every other way I will be—then, the more my will is replaced by the will of God, the less I fear death and the less death exists for me. And if my personal self-interested desires are completely replaced by the desire to do God’s will, then nothing but life will remain for me.
To replace the transient and the worldly with the eternal—that is the path of life, and that is where we should go. But how? That is something that each of us knows in their soul.
To occasionally remember death means to live without thinking about it. Instead of remembering death, we should live calmly and joyfully with the consciousness of its constant approach.
