SOME PEOPLE believe in an afterlife; others don’t. There’s no way for any of us to know for sure until we die. Of the many who’ve already died, no one ever has ever come back to tell us what it was like.
Everyone is entitled to his or her opinion, but there is some advantage to believing that when you’re dead, you’re dead, and that’s that. Belief in the finality of death helps us to take each moment of life more seriously. If we have only one go-around, we should make the most of it. We are likely to be more attentive to whatever richness we can experience.
Some of us may be tempted to obsess morbidly that there’s no point to living, if it’s all going to be over someday. There are people who react that way to scientific predictions that our solar system has only a few more million years to survive. But if we give ourselves a break, we can put our mortality to good use. It can help us avoid procrastinating, being careless, or being inattentive; it can also help us live each day as if it were our last.
Let yourself be enlivened by the imminence of death.