Rick's Journal (Replies Welcome)

Entry #118 (Death)

Death can be a wake-up call for a lot of people, especially those who are young. When we have youth, we believe that we have all the time in the world. We simply cannot imagine us growing old into a senior who struggle to do even the most basic things in life. Youth gives us a sense of invincibility until we get a taste of reality through experiences that are too close for comfort.

When we lose someone close, we feel a part of us is gone forever. If the person happened to be around our age, we realize that our sense of invincibility was misplaced. We are mortal like everyone else and, just like every living organism on this planet, we know not when our time is up. It can be tomorrow or it can be several decades later. The fact that we don't know can be a gruesome experience.

When we learn that we have finite time on this planet, we start to panic. We start to recall our past and see all the time we wasted. The time in the past is gone forever but we don't realize that when we are too young to understand. We have all those golden years that we could've turned into something incredible. Instead, those times were wasted and we can only think about the what ifs scenarios.

At some point in our lives, we'll be thinking about the what ifs. What if I worked harder at school? What if I asked that person out for a date? What if I took up the opportunity? There are countless what if scenarios we can imagine but they won't ever come true as we lost the opportunity to do so. Death makes the loss of those time permanent and we'd only waste more time if we ponder how we could've changed it.

That's it for the one hundred eighteenth entry.

Entry #119 (Death)

If we have an eternity to live, what will we accomplish in life? The answer is very little since we have no rush in getting anything done now. If our procrastination is this bad when we are mortals, then turning us into immortals will likely see our procrastination reach new heights. In a way, death is the driving force for change because nothing terrifies people more than their end.

For some of us, we want to leave behind some sort of legacy. We don't want to be another name on a tombstone somewhere nobody knows about. We want to achieve something in life so our time on this world was meaningful. Essentially, we want to know that we had a purpose and we got a chance to live that purpose by impacting more lives than just our own.

A lot of us have trouble getting motivated into doing something we know is great for us. We can name all the reasons from the top of our head but we have yet to take the actions necessary. What if we were suddenly told that we have a month left to live? We undoubtedly will change all of our habits so we are geared to accomplish more in that single month than ten years.

When we realize that time isn't a luxury anymore, we'll do many things differently. In our new vocabulary, procrastination no longer exists because there are so many tomorrows left. We cannot say next year when it's very possible we'll be gone by then. What's amazing and unfortunate about this situation is that, during these last moments we have on this world, we defy all odds and discover we can accomplish the impossible.

That's it for the one hundred nineteenth entry.