And the two things seemed intrinsically related. They were opposites but they were also the same. Fear is compounded by uncertainty and choosing something takes the pain of that uncertainty and turns it into something controllable. It is stupid, really. I wanted to die because I didn’t want to die.
It seems to me that the fear of death, like the fear of anything, is made worse when we don’t talk about it and make it visible. Fears become stronger when we don’t see them. People fear great white sharks, unfairly, because of the film Jaws. One of many interesting facts about that seminal summer blockbuster is that we don’t see the shark fully until we are one hour and twenty-one minutes into the film, which is way past the halfway point. Now there are boringly practical reasons for that—chiefly that the mechanical shark rarely worked during filming—but that doesn’t undermine the point: the shark is scarier for not being seen.
The same, I would say, is true of death. Even more than sex, death is a teeth-grindingly uncomfortable subject for many human beings, certainly those of us living in modern Western cultures. And yet death forms the basis for so many of our deepest concerns.
And it is a part of life. It helps define life. It raises the value of our time here, and the value of the people we spend it with. The silence at the end of the song is as important as the song itself.
Or, as Nietzsche put it: “The end of a melody is not its goal: but nonetheless, had the melody not reached its end it would not have reached its goal either.”
Underwater
We are where we need to be. We have never lived in the past. There is no past. There is no future. There is just a series of presents. One after the other. And although there are an infinite number of meditations and online tutorials teaching us how to “inhabit the present,” we already do this without trying. We always inhabit the present. “Forever is composed of nows,” as Emily Dickinson told us. So being “in the now” is something we don’t have to work at. When we are imagining our future or mourning the past we aren’t in either—we are inhabiting the present, and only the present, because a memory or dream is remembered or dreamed with the tools and texture of the present. It is always today. Yesterday and tomorrow are also todays.
But of course, when we talk about inhabiting the present we mean something else. We are talking about how to actually enjoy the present, free from worries. To actually live it the way we imagine some other animals manage to, without fretting about what is to come, or without scrolling through Instagram until our thumb falls off. To live. To “launch yourself on every wave” and “find your eternity in each moment” in the words of Henry David Thoreau. Though, to be perfectly honest, that sounds a little exhausting and maybe just a tad impractical. There are some moments that are simply going to be a little bit mediocre and unnoticed. The pressure to live so deeply in every moment could also make us feel like we have one more thing to fail at. And the irony for me is that I was closest to finding eternity in every moment when I was suicidally depressed. At that point I was agonizingly aware of being in the moment. And every moment felt like forever. A day was a lifetime. The waves of time I was being launched into were drowning me. I was underwater and I couldn’t breathe.
I would have done anything not to be inside the moment. To be unaware of the moment. To achieve not mindfulness, but total mindlessness. To fast-track into a better future or hitch-hike back to the past.
So, for me, the aim of “being in the moment” is not enough. I want to be sure that being in the moment won’t kill me.
One key barrier to enjoying the present is the fact that a lot of us—me included—are completists. We can’t just sit there basking in being, because of all those unfinished things. Those unanswered emails, and unpaid bills, and unmet goals. How can we just be when there is so much to do?
The hardest dream of all to achieve is the dream of not being tormented by our unlived dreams. To cope with and accept unfulfillment as a natural human condition. To be complete in