Death is at the same time predictable and unpredictable.
It's predictable in the sense that everyone knows that it will happen. It is unpredictable in that nobody knows how. This is the paradox of death. This is why the thought of death is both an immobilizing and a motivating force for all life forms. In the face of death we either flee or freeze as adrenaline rushes through our galvanized arteries. We cannot decide how to react because death is absolute in its ambiguity. It will happen, and it will not happen.
For this reason, I have trouble deciding how to answer the question I posed in the title: "What would I say [in this post] if today were my last day?" On the one hand, I am certain that I will die. Knowing this serves as a motivation to get all my thoughts out before the end, to preserve my most current philosophical thought in a form that will survive me. But on the other hand, if I take seriously the immanence of termination, I betray my desire to instill meaning in my final days even by writing this post. Why? Because it would be pathetic and meaningless to die in the midst of broadcasting my thoughts over the Internet and thinking that they would really represent my thinking in a genuine form. The question itself, "What would I say if today were my last day?" must transform itself in the face of death into something completely different:
Why would I say anything if today were my last day?
That is, why would I waste what little time I had left writing a blog post? It would be a terrible waste, wouldn't it? In theory, I could be reading my favorite book, or calling my loved ones, or making another cup of coffee and putting in extra cream and sugar—doing anything, really, that would actually give me a sense of heightened meaning and closure on my final day, anything act that would stand as a symbolic gesture of, "OK, now I'm ready to go. I've tied together all my loose ends." But instead, I choose to whack away at a keyboard and write out some thoughts that I'm sure nobody will actually read. By saying anything at all, I forget that meaning comes not from words typed on a screen, but from actions.
But here, the ambiguity of death—its simultaneous distance and immanence—gives me some room to say a few things despite the possibility of a meaningless death without closure.
First, if I were to die today, I would say that I was never really sure whether I followed my dreams. I think I'm not alone in this because the strength and subtlety of the ideologies of our culture prevent me at times from understanding what I really want in the first place. What are my dreams, and how do I distinguish them from what society tells me my dreams should be?
I am not sure whether I followed my dreams.
What do I think my dreams are? I dream of being a husband of a beautiful woman and a father of beautiful children. I dream of being a stay-at-home father who teaches his children to love themselves, to see themselves as good and noble people, and to be free from the guilt and shame that I experienced in my adolescence as a follower of Christianity. I dream of starting a society where people pledge loyalty to one another in the face of uncertain futures, where people embrace simplicity in material things and complexity in ideas, and where those values I mentioned before, in addition to honesty, freedom, and courage, would form a palpable backbone for our lives.
I dream of giving people real freedom.
I can't say I know I have done this for anyone. But I know that I have (mostly) freed myself to some degree. That, and others have opened windows for me through which I was able to free myself. But the point is that, because I am pretty sure that I have not done this for others, I feel that my dream is only realized in part, and that, provided I had a bit more time to live, I would really want to make this my mission. Freedom is, in my view, what really matters.
The second thing I would say, if I were to die today, is a piece of advice for all the living:
Remind yourself daily never to be afraid.
Fear is an instrument of self-preservation. All forms of fear are forms of self-preservation. If you are afraid, it is because your body wants to keep on living. It is because your ego wants to maximize its chances of surviving either in your body or in that of another with whom it identifies (thus love, compassion, etc.). But self-preservation in itself is an end that the body seeks but does not understand. The body (mind included) operates within a fixed realm of self-serving beliefs: the belief that life is good, that the body should exist, and that death is bad and scary. It "believes" these things biologically, as if programmed to do so in the womb, and it cannot be convinced otherwise for very long. Forgetting to fear death can only be a temporary bodily condition, like an illness. It must end in either the death of the body itself or recovery from the "illness." Maybe I'm cynical, but it seems that every time someone has a revelation that death is nothing to be feared, they either (a) die or (b) get over it. Their bodies cannot be permanently convinced of the proposition because the nature of the body is to contradict that very proposition by living.
There is much to be experienced by way of not fearing death, but our bodies betray themselves and limit themselves by being themselves and serving themselves.
Another thing:
Happiness need not be complicated.
When I was walking around my neighborhood with my parents earlier this week, I realized that I was happy for the first time in a while. Why? Because I was on top of my work, loved, well-fed, clothed and comfortable. My father told me that "This is real life," as in, this state of happiness is the way things really are, and you should never forget that. "This is real life" in that this should be my default state.
And that's something that has taken me a long time to learn. I was extremely troubled as an adolescent. I alternated between believing I was worthless if I did not drop everything and become a radical, voluntarily poor Christian and believing that I was a terrible sinner stuck in a vortex of self-destructive habits. Occasionally I found myself enraptured in the arms of another adolescent, but the God figure in my head always loomed between me and the genuine enjoyment of my relationships and clouded my view. Long story short, I developed a very complicated view of happiness that most of the time prevented me from being happy at all. At some level, I needed to go through that in order to become who I am today, but on another level, it was awful and I wish it didn't have to happen.
My advice, therefore, is not to overcomplicate your happiness. Just let yourself be satisfied.
Which brings me to my last point. (Last because the weather is too gorgeous outside for me to waste my "final day" typing away.) My last point is this:
I am so glad that my life happened the way it did.
Shortly before he went insane, Friedrich Nietzsche wrote in his work Ecce Homo, "At this very moment I still look upon my future—an ample future!—as upon calm seas: there is no ripple of desire. I do not want in the least that anything should become different than it is; I myself do not want to become different" (EH, II.ix).
There are times in my life when I look back on everything that has happened to me, on all the things I've done—people I've loved, hearts I've broken, classes I've taken, books I've read, places I've gone, etc.—and I just stand in awe of the whole thing. I'm in awe of two things: one, the fact that I am alive; and two, the fact that there is life. To think of the alternative—that there be no me, and no life—is so mind-boggling that I am forced to cling to what is with the desperate grip of a newborn monkey on its mother's back. I cannot fathom there not being anything. The sheer impossibility of nothingness is what compels me to (dare I say) worship existence, to throw myself down before life itself and say, "Yes. You are my dream. You are my calling. You are my every desire."
I think I've said enough now. Despite my initial thought that I might regret spending my "last moments" writing a blog post, I wouldn't have had it any other way. I learned more writing this than I did all week just living my life.
