How can you live meaningfully when life will end?
Knowing that everyone dies can remain a distant fact until someone dies who seemed to have as much time as you. Then your own plans may look strange. Why learn something, care for a home or look forward to next year if none of it can last?
The question contains a demanding condition: for life to matter, its value must survive forever. Yet much of what you already value has never met that condition.
If someone sits with you through a lonely afternoon, their company matters while you are together. You may remember it for years or eventually forget the details. Either way, you were less alone that afternoon. The eventual ending of both lives does not turn the company into something that never helped.
In I’m grateful, Innocent Mwatsikesimbe considers how seeing sickness and death can make us afraid of living. He recognises that these things could happen to him too. His response is gratitude for the life and good things present now, even though their continuation is uncertain.
A Spark from The Vision
Yes, it will all end one day; but today is worth living.
This gives mortality a different place in the day. It remains something you cannot remove, but it is no longer the only fact allowed to say what the day is worth. The person beside you is here too. So is something you enjoy doing, or a kindness you would like to offer. You can give those things your attention without first securing them against every possible loss.
There can be sadness in that attention. Loving a person includes knowing you cannot keep them forever. Gratitude need not make that knowledge painless. It lets you recognise the good of being together while the uncertainty remains.
Sometimes fear of wasting life creates another difficulty. You begin to demand that every day justify itself through a memorable experience or an achievement. Rest looks like failure. An ordinary week seems too small for the seriousness of being mortal.
But a life lived under that demand can leave little room to enjoy what it contains. You finish one worthwhile thing and immediately ask whether it was enough. The ending you cannot prevent has become a standard that no afternoon can satisfy.
You can care about how you live without putting every hour on trial. Some days contain work you did not choose, tiredness or pain that makes gratitude difficult. They still belong to your life; you do not have to declare them wonderful to remain involved in it.
The question of death may return even during a good day. You may have no new answer to it. There can still be something you want to hear, someone you are glad to see, or a little enjoyment you need not refuse merely because it will end.
Related lessons
AI-generated from Innocent Mwatsikesimbe's writing.
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