LIFE IN NUTSHELL

Marcus Aurelius once said, “it’s not death that we should fear, we should fear never beginning to live.” When we die, our life line does this (Figure 1). When we are alive our life line does this (Figure 2). 

 Figure 1. Straight Line, an image of things not moving ahead. You are dead.

Figure 2. Image of a zigzag line exhibiting your movement. You are living.

Notice how that connects with our real experience of life. Life is full of ups and downs, it means you are alive. Twists and turns, love and loss, happiness and sadness, success and failure. We experience extreme highs, peaks and summits. And at the same time experience the troughs, the lows and submit. Life is kind of like one big crazy roller coaster. Starts slowly, fill you with anticipation and curiosity, takes you up and then sends you flying down only to rise up quickly, again. We laugh until it hurts, we cry inside a little, experience a few moments where we want it to stop and hope it’s all over, but it just keeps going (Figure 2). 

We somehow think that success is linear, an upward line; there is literally no case study for that. Everyone we admire has ups and downs. Your body mostly replaces itself every seven to fifteen years. The organs that work the hardest have the fastest changeover. You get a whole new skin every two to four weeks. Your red blood cells last less than half a year. And your liver renews itself at least once every couple of years. 

The universe is always changing, we are always changing, but we want to remain the same. We settle for security, not recognizing that flat life line means we are dead. Real life is ups and downs (Figure 2, zigzag lines), death looks like this (Figure 1, a straight line). Every time I see that (Figure 1) I remind myself this is (Figure 2, zigzag line) living, (image of straight line, Figure 1) this isn’t. In the journey of life, we pass pleasure and pain. There will be sunshine and rain, there will be loss and gain. But we must learn to move forward again and again. Don’t judge the moment. Don’t try to hang on, because it will keep pushing you forward. 

And remember, this morning if you are healthy you are happier than one million people that will not survive this week. If there is food in your fridge, shoes on your feet, clothes on your body, a bed to sleep on and a roof over your head, you are richer than seventy five percent of people in the world. And if you have bank account, money in your wallet, or a purse, or coins in a jar, you are in the top eight percent of the world’s wealthiest. We cannot avoid the ups and downs, but we can change the way we see them. Because as Wayne Dyer said, “when we change the way we look at things, the things we look at change.”

And take this from me (Figure 3), I believe this very strongly. But I fear nothing including the deadly death. I have the guts to say you are wrong if you are and I believe in myself the way you believe.

Figure 3. Image of a Don, who believes whatever is said in the Sarah Snow narrative.