Мost of us do our best to not to think about death. But there’s always a part of our minds that knows this can’t go on forever. Part of us always knows that we’re just a doctor’s visit away, a phone call away, from being starkly reminded with the fact of our own mortality, or of those closest to us. I’m sure, many of you in this room have experienced this in some form. You must know how uncanny it is to suddenly be thrown out of the normal course of your life and just be given the full-time job of not dying; or caring for someone who is. The one thing people tend to realize, at moments like this, is that they wasted a lot of time, when life was normal. It’s not just what they did with their time, it’s not just that they spent too much time working, or compulsively checking e-mail, it’s that they cared about the wrong things. They regret what they cared about. Their attention was bound up in petty concerns, year after year, when life was normal. And this is a paradox, of course, because we all know this epiphany is coming. Don’t you know this is coming? Don’t you know that there’s gonna come a day when you’ll be sick, or someone close to you will die, and you’ll look back on the kinds of things that captured your attention and you’ll think: ”What was I doing?” You know this, and yet, if you’ll like most people, you’ll spend most of your time in life tacitly presuming you’ll live forever – doing things like watching a bad movie for the fourth time. Or bickering with your spouse. These things only make sense in light of eternity. There better be a Heaven if we’re gonna waste our time like that.
Sam Harris. 2012. (Title: Death and the Present Moment)
