Death: The Roommate of Life - More To That

In the clarity that followed, I discovered another lesson: creation cannot emerge without confronting death. Standing at the edge of the void, something new can be born. In accepting my mortality—both its inevitability and proximity—something within me softened, creating space for something unexpected. Death strips away what no longer serves us, cl... See more

The tricky part of illness is that, as you go through it, your values are constantly changing. You try to figure out what matters to you, and then you keep figuring it out. It felt like someone had taken away my credit card and I was having to learn how to budget. You may decide you want to spend your time working as a neurosurgeon, but two months

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The only real question about all this finitude is whether we’re willing to confront it or not. And this, for Heidegger, is the central challenge of human existence: since finitude defines our lives, he argues that living a truly authentic life—becoming fully human—means facing up to that fact. We must live out our lives, to whatever extent we can, ... See more

It is by consciously confronting the certainty of death, and what follows from the certainty of death, that we finally become truly present for our lives. This is the kernel of wisdom in the cliché of the celebrity who claims that a brush with cancer was “the best thing that ever happened” to them: it pitches them into a more authentic mode of bein... See more