Elese Coit

Death is not a topic we have comfortably integrated. It is shrouded in superstition, and fear of it underpins so much of our thinking and it plays out in the way we speak about stopping aging, how we treat 'older' people and the things we tell  ourselves about our own bodies. 

A large plastic surgery industry feeds off a simple fear, that others will not approve of us, although that is not entirely the fault of surgeons. They are only responding to the ways we ourselves are choosing to deal with becoming older.  

Would we really treat people the way we do, would we ignore our children, would we not go to dinner with Mom this week, again, if we had a healthy sense of our own mortality? Wouldn't knowing we do not have a guarantee of tomorrow in the least, shuffle our priorities so radically that we might be unrecognizable?   If we really knew tomorrow we'd be lucky to wake up, would we be making any of our same choices today?

Despite all our daily worries about the future, the future in fact does not exist.   (Nor does the past, for that matter, but that's another topic). When we live in worry about what isn't real, we suffer, we lose all our joy and we try run around creating  solutions for a problem that is does not exist.  We waste so much energy and time and love.  You don't have to look further than Chile and Haiti to know there is no tomorrow.  Let's be something more than just occupied.  Let's stop being busy and consider what's meaningful to us.

There really is only one moment.  The one you and I are living now. 

if you are interested in this topic, listen to the show with Stan Goldberg, Lessons For Living Without Regret