Life Is a Rest Stop, Then You Die
My grandma died this past summer. It was sort of strange, really. She had lived a long life but everyone thought she could’ve lived a little longer. Up until her death at 93 years old, she was walking around, telling stories, and generally at peace.
Until I got that phone call from my dad on my way to see her for the last time. “Your grandma passed away”.
Amidst all the chaos of my family at the time and figuring out how I would spend my time with them during this sad season, I thought death comes when you least expect it and leaves you with lots of questions.
Questions like:
Am I going to live to be old like my grandparents?
What happens if no one is going to take care of me?
Am I going to be able to survive?
Will I have to constantly work for the rest of my life?
Does anything really matter anyway?
I pondered all this at a rest stop as the tears flowed down my face.
Life is short, no one cares about your problems
If you think people generally care about your problems, then you are fooling yourself. Nine times out of ten, people will say they care, but their actions prove otherwise.
I was sitting at the rest stop when I realized this.
Most people want to help others, but at the end of the day we have our own problems to fix. The world is kind of like that. It will chew and spit you out like leftovers. It will run you ragged and dry, leaving you for dead.
When it comes down to it, sometimes it’s ok if nobody cares.
Imagine if we cared so much for other people’s problems, even til death. When all is said and done, we want people to come and help us, and care for us, but at who’s expense? Maybe it’s high time we re-evaluated self-care and empathy. Those words get tossed around a lot. We need this to change.
It’s important that we take care of ourselves first before we put the oxygen mask on someone else. But sometimes it just doesn’t do any good for anybody.
When we care too much about other people’s issues or the way they think about us, it puts a damper on ours and causes us to project all kinds of false attributes and hopes.
Delusion ensues.
Get busy living, or get busy dying
It’s time we wake up from the dream. The world and all its idiosyncratic ways are sinking into the dirt of our existential nightmares.
We want to trust that someday there is hope and that we will make it to the end, but there is a good chance you will die many times in this life.
We will die to hopes and dreams, ideas and ways of being that didn’t really align with us to begin with. Maybe it’s your religion while growing up, or that habit you possessed because you didn’t work on becoming “a better you”. Whatever it is, we think that the world is linear and that we will arrive on some celestial plain unscathed by the realities of life.
I once met an older woman who made me think hard about the true nature of life and reality. She suffered most of her life battling breast cancer and for a while, she thought she tamed it.
Her response to someone asking her what she would do with her life if she had lost hope was pretty grim: “Get busy living, or get busy dying.”
That was her response.
It wasn’t some cookie cutter approach to life. She knew that one day she would die. It might have been tomorrow or next week. Maybe she would have another few years. But whatever stance she chose, she knew that she was the one who had control over her perspective.
Whatever life threw at her, she knew she was a fighter and wouldn’t take mediocrity as the end all be all. She wanted to live, and if not that, then to die.
That’s pretty black and white. Not too basic, right?
Find a way to make life worth living
A lot of us don’t know how to live. We choke up when someone dies. But what if that person chose that? What if their life was full of hope and they had lived their best life according to what life threw at them?
Maybe they were only in their 20s when they died. Or maybe they lived a long life well into their 90s.
Many of us are stuck in places where we are slowly dying.
It doesn’t matter if we live to 10 or 100. What matters is if you made life worth living.
We have to find a way to make it worth it, and we can only decide on that. No one else can dictate that for us. Even though the world is changing, and the people who live in it — somehow we have to adapt and grieve the way things were. We also have to let go and let things die in order for new things to appear.
It’s hard.
When I realized that things would change with the death of my grandma, I also realized that I had to make some sort of meaning out of my existence.
I still struggle with that.
When someone dies, whether it be a family member or a friend, it changes your inner world. The energy that person brings and the dynamics that were shared shift in favor of something new.
Meaning can easily be tossed out during this time and likelihood isn’t all that familiar. It’s like standing on a shaky bridge.
When the fog subsides and your grief becomes more palpable, it’s when we pick up the pieces and build a life worth living. It’s where death greets us at the door and tells us that we better not care too much about what people think of us, or if we are being authentic with our lives and living out our best one.
It’s where we step into another life while still living and not coming close to death in a physical sense.
In a way, we have all been there. It’s like we are tired of it. It’s like we know all this has happened before and we are reliving it, trying to learn a lesson or experience it all over again. It can be frustrating but liberating.
