The Moments End for Each of Us

It’s easy to overlook the most fundamental aspect of our reality – at some moment, our engaged, animated and sensing selves will cease to be. We will all die. We will all, at some point, transition from participants in the world… to once participated. And the world will continue, almost exactly as it had before. The week after we die, our neighbour will still be coming home. The supermarket assistant will stack the shelves. And our bank manager will still be stuck at work. Except for a small handful of people, the show will go on exactly as it had before our death.

There are no exceptions. Having a billion dollars or a million-person Twitter following won’t immunise any of us from becoming just another small spec of history. Yes, some things might delay death – better diet or good exercise. But we’re into ‘delay’, not ‘defeat’. There’s nothing that we can do to avoid the Participated Club, with its esteemed membership which includes some rather notable names – Abraham, Jesus, Mohammed, Einstein, Socrates, Buddha, Newton and Da Vinci. All once living; and then not. Just like each of us will be.

Losing loved ones is a fleeting reminder that we will one day “expire”, a South Asian synonym for death. Such forfeitures puncture the self-delusion of self-perpetuity. And the loss of more than a couple of close family and friends is an especially effective pedagogical tool, helping to translate intellectual knowledge to something more visceral and genuine. A core characteristic of that higher learning is the migration from a mere awareness to an acceptance that what happened to those we’ve buried or cremated, will inevitably happen to us. Inevitably.

The trick to managing this certainty is in distinguishing between the real and the fa?ade early enough – and to see the present not as a finite moment in infinite time, but as an infinite moment in finite time. We might have defiled Horace’s phrase carpe diem (pluck the day) as a prosaic populist soundbite, but it deserves a re-location to a more gentrified place. We can make our moments count or not, we can expand or retract the now, we can enjoy or dislike, love or hate; but what we can’t do is to extend our time.

Most people appreciate wealth, status and beauty amongst other things. Most of also want to continue our existence. That said, our postmodern busyness, with its apocalyptic bombardment of distractions (both real and electronic) undermines valuing our own lives and the importance of the moments from birth to death. We seem so engrossed in the suffocating cycle of things to do, FOMO, praying for approval on Instagram and everything else, that we don’t pause to live. We are a response droid, desperately out of touch with our authentic self.

If we could spend a little time to reflect upon the limited nature of our life, one of the few characteristics that we share with every single human being past, present and future, we would have made our world and the world we live in a better place. That strikes me as a good thing. Instead of drifting through the present or flooding it with the pressures from outside, if we can remind ourselves of our eventual ‘expiry’, how can we not up our game to strive to make the best use of the moments that, once combined together, constitute our lives?