Human beings went through the trouble of inventing rules that imposed limits on their lives, boxing them up into hours, days, and years. And then they invented clocks to make time’s rule over us even more precise.

A lot of people buy into the slogan “Live life like there’s no tomorrow.” But I tend to disagree. Once you become aware of your impending death, you have to make a compromise in accepting the loss of the life you wish you could have led and the reality of your imminent death. Sure, there will always be regrets and broken dreams, but you have to go

To live means to cry, to shout, to love, to do silly things, to feel sadness and joy, to laugh, even to experience horrible, frightening things. Beautiful songs, beautiful scenery, nausea, people singing, planes flying across the sky, the thundering hooves of horses, mouthwatering pancakes, the endless darkness of space, cowboys firing their

However, when you think about it, a human being can never really grieve their own death. Death is always something that happens to other people around them.

My whole life will be summed up in those moments that I won’t be around to see—the time after I’m dead.

that they’ll always be there and that you’ll figure out how to get along somehow. At least, that’s what I always believed and I never questioned what was to me such an obvious assumption. What’s ironic is that my father and I both believed in this unspoken truth. We never bothered to talk to each other, to ask how the other was feeling or what he

I got so caught up with all the little everyday tasks that I ended up wasting the time that I could have been spending on more important things. But the scariest thing is that I never even noticed that I was wasting my own precious time. If only I’d stopped for a moment to get some perspective, away from all that running around I was doing, it

What would the differences be between the world in which I existed (however briefly) and a different world where almost everything is exactly the same, except in this parallel universe I never existed? It is all those differences, however minuscule, that make up my existence.

I’ve come to realize that there’s a certain beauty in those regrets. They’re proof of having lived.