Time moves so quickly. One moment it's early morning, and before I realize it, the day has already reached 5 PM. As I settle into my routine, preparing for an early sleep, and slowing down from 5 pm with no lights in my room, I find myself reflecting on how fast the days, and indeed life, seem to slip by.
Each morning, I wake up at 3:40 AM, but by the time I ‘start’ my Morning Pages, it’s already ten minutes past. The simple act of getting out of bed, along with a few moments of lingering laziness, eats into my time. It’s in these small, seemingly insignificant moments that I begin to realize just how quickly life is passing. Major life events—like children getting married and starting their own families—will come and go, but before I’ve fully grasped their significance, time will have flown by, and one day, death will arrive.
This thought brings with it an unsettling realization: it’s easy to reach the end of life without feeling like we’ve truly lived. The fear of an unfulfilled life might lead us to long for another chance—another life where we can experience everything we feel we missed. But that longing comes with its own burden: the idea of going through the entire process of childhood, (homework!), growth, and all the challenges of life again isn’t exactly appealing to me.
If I felt that this life was incomplete or not fully lived, would I really want to start all over? The hope is that by truly experiencing this life, I might not feel the need for another. Yet, this is only relevant if I believe in reincarnation, something I’m not entirely certain about as of now.
Anatomically speaking, if our feelings and sensations are merely the result of the brain's activity, then perhaps there is no existence beyond the physical body after that event. In that case, whether I die feeling fulfilled or not might not matter. The death of my body might simply contribute to new life in the universe in some form—not necessarily human, but perhaps as a colony of bacteria surviving until cremation. Or, maybe, the body just turns to smoke and fumes, with no living matter left behind.
Then there's the age-old question: is there truly a difference between living and non-living matter as we understand it today? Perhaps not. Everything, after all, is energy, constantly recycled in one form or another.
But despite all this, the question remains: should I face death with a sense of un-fulfillment? Wouldn’t it be better to meet that moment with the contentment of knowing that I’ve truly lived and experienced all that life had to offer? Perhaps physical pain or discomfort will be there, but at least I would find rest in knowing that my life wasn’t wasted. This doesn’t mean I need to do extraordinary things like charity work, but simply that the years I lived were truly lived and experienced every bit—not just passed in seconds or minutes.
It makes me wonder if there’s anything in the universe that experiences life this way—fully aware and fulfilled. I can try and emulate that if such a thing exists. There is also of course a question, when death comes, does it matter if I die with a sense of fulfillment? I believe it does. The contentment of living fully isn’t something that happens at the moment of death; it’s a feeling that should develop much sooner, continuing through to the end.
So how do I achieve this? The benefit of living a fully experienced life is that I’d be happier and more at peace, knowing that life didn’t just pass by in a blur. Strangely, it’s often the painful moments that leave the deepest impressions. I can still vividly remember the sorrow of my father’s death and other disappointments more than the happy moments. But that doesn’t mean I want my life filled with pain so I can remember all of my life.
Is living fully in the ‘present’ the answer? I’m not sure. In the end, does anything really matter? If I could remember every moment of my life, I could relive it all as many times as I wanted, finding fulfillment in the passage of time. Perhaps that’s the key: to live fully ‘aware of the present’, so that when the time comes, I’ll know that I truly lived it all.
Epilogue: The trigger to this blog was a reflection by my father when he was alive until few months back, and I had asked him if he also felt his life passed so quickly. For example to me, the feeling of passing of my CA exam feels like today, but most others none. His confirmation at his age of 92 then, shocked me that even 92 years seemed like passing away in a jiffy to him. It gave me unsettling thought if I may also not doing something right. Why doesn’t 92 years feel like the full 92 years? Today it culminated into some thoughts as I wrote my Morning Pages. I miss him a LOT, and can’t reconcile to the fact that I don’t have any more a good friend, guide I had all my life. It’s a vacuum I can never fill.
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