Some Reflections on 2019
What’s notable about 2019? Well, lots of things. Trump impeached. Spice Girls reunited. Baby Yoda. Probably some other things as well. But, one notable thing that’s been on my mind is the fact that tens of millions of people died in 2019. More than 50 million, in fact — somewhere around the population of England. But our brains can’t fathom numbers that size. Try this: two humans die every second. Dozens of people have died just in the time you’ve spent reading these words. Roughly, each breath you take equates to the final breath of two other human beings — each with lives that had been as vivid as yours is right now.
I’ve been thinking a lot about all those deaths. I’ve been thinking a lot about death generally. Partly, this is because it’s been a year of loss for me, with an unfortunate amount of time spent at hospitals and funeral homes. But it’s not just that. It’s also that death is always with me — it’s always with each of us. Death provides a silent — and sometimes deafening — soundtrack to our lives. It’s always playing, whether we hear it or not. So, while 2019 has meant a lot of things to me, it has perhaps most of all been a year of death.
Our lives are experienced as a succession of present moments. This stream of present-ness means that future and past are abstractions. If we look at how life feels, it is only ever now. Now. Now. From childhood when you feel the cool breeze on a swing set to old age, prostrate and dazed on your deathbed, and every moment in between, all you ever have is experience of the present. That’s all you ever have — until you don’t.
What this means is that the random gift of life brings with it an absolute guarantee of death, and therefore suffering. Suffering — pain, loss, change, yearning, annihilation — is life’s own shadow. It follows life, wherever it may go. But that’s not always a bad thing. Many times in the past year I had the opportunity to close my eyes and turn my attention to the mere fact that I was alive. I turned my attention to the old brag of my heart, to the 2.4 × 10^22 molecules exhaled with each breath, to the sensation of my legs and my body touching the ground, and the experience of a blurry barrier between myself and the so-called outside world. I simply and straightforwardly paid attention to existence, a phenomenon of which I was taking part. I was alive. And (at the time of this writing) I am alive right now as well. An extension of the universe getting the ephemeral opportunity to experience itself. And in this attention, there is the background radiation of death. There is and has been the sensation that to experience just one moment of undimmed consciousness like this is worth all the strife that life implies.
I couldn’t have those moments without a radical connection to my mortality and an acknowledgment of the inescapability of suffering. A lucid awareness of suffering is perhaps the universe’s most persuasive mechanism for emphasizing the glory of being alive. In those cherished moments of true contentedness, those penetrating experiences of love and adventure, all those present moments where life is truly lived — those are perhaps the most precious commodity in all the cosmos. And if you are reading these words, then you are, right now, a possessor of a gift that is granted to only a fleeting few. You are breathing in rarefied cosmic air. But your oxygen tank is quite finite. Breath deeply while you still can — and remember that with each breath, two people take their last.
2020 is here. Here we go. It is now. Now. Now. Turn to your loved ones and tell them how much you treasure them. Tell yourself that too. Tell the trees and the seas and the air. When death is truly confronted, when it’s moved from the realm of abstraction to the world of in-the-flesh reality, it renders each moment palpable and luminous, bringing with it a sort of emotional clarity. You and everyone you love will die. And when this inevitably happens, it won’t be in the future. It will be in the present. A present that is as real and rich and vivid as the one you’re experiencing as you read these words. There is simply no greater motivation to embrace and treasure one another. 2020 is here and it’s waiting for no one. Turn your attention to your aliveness, including its inescapable shadows of mortality. Give audience to death’s bittersweet lullabies. And then live with those melodies in your ear. Live. Experience. Feel. You don’t know how much longer this present moment will last.
