How Can We Be More Lucky?
We’ve been repeatedly told and we tried to remind ourselves time and again that we’re lucky to be alive. At the back of our head, we know intellectually that life is short and we can die anytime. As morbid as this sounds, what we can learn from this acknowledgement is that there isn’t much to be learned from such experiences. I believe a near-death experience would immediately shock and alter the states of most of our mindsets.
But, I’ll place my bet that it is the less dramatic, slower-dawning awareness of our body’s decline that will paradoxically draw us closer to realise that life is precious.
It starts with the blurring of eyesight. We dismiss it with long working hours spent starring at our computer screens as well as (hopefully) occasional mindless scrolling of Facebook before our bedtime. Then, it moves on to the slowing of metabolism. We want to eat. In fact, we want to eat A LOT, but it appears that we’re at the age where eating a lot has almost immediate repercussions; both felt and seen. Somehow along the way, we start to experience erratic sleeping patterns and back aches in spots we don’t even know exists.
The reality of our mortality is looming steadily nearby.
There will be a time where we all stumble upon the low point of the common morale. As reliable as the passing of seasons is, as to the sun’s rise and setting, along with the cyclic nature of clocks and calendars, our time is promised too. Our hearts will keep on ceaselessly beating, until the day it stops. Tim Kreider describes it best, “Time is a one-way arrow, as ruthless as gravity, plummeting us toward a date no one wants to know, like the ground expanding towards us.” Our life, or death, depending on how we see it, is an ongoing, slow-motion disaster. Aging is a leisure descent. Everything is fine, till our mind starts to drift into a less optimal imaginary scenario when we undergo what we suspect to be an occasional skipped beat.
We casually dismiss our health like how we tell ourselves that we’re imagining things when we hear the distant echo of someone screaming in the middle of the night.
We’re enjoying ourselves now at the cost of pain later on. So what can we do? If we’re going to drink alcohol, choose normal-sized glasses. Get more quality sleep. Eat less processed foods. Exercise with a positive peer group. Do new things, take a cold shower! It will help to lower inflammation in the body and serve as an effective nervous system reset. Learn new things, brush our teeth with the opposite hand! It will help in warding off cognitive decline. Or, we can take the leap of faith and travel to the places we’ve always wanted to go, write the book that we’ve always wanted to write and say the words we’ve always wanted to say to the people we care about. After all, we’re lucky to be alive, isn’t it?
