Most of us can understand and are aware of the concept of death, and it is probably one of the most feared aspects of our being. Glancing thoughts are usually the most we attribute to the time and place for which we will go dark, so it isn’t thought of most of the time as we pass day to day.
There is plenty of people who speak on behalf of a motivating factor of death, by using aphorism such as “you only live once’, “carpe diem” and “life too short”. This is spoken, written and even tattooed on skin throughout the world, but a question remains if the thought of death motivates us to do all the things we want to do?
Those that have lived a long life and are seeing their sunset approaching will tell a coin of two sides of life. The side with happiness or experiences they can share that they realized in their life and the other side, which is the regrets they share of the experiences they never did have but wished too.
The people who are of old age and knowing that death is much closer to them than most, for the most part, idle themselves to rest rather than to seize the day of any effort of activity towards accomplishing goals. Those who are faced with a terminal illness also have different outlook of death, according to some research done on this. Those that are knowing the time frame of their own death often share a positive outlook towards it and accept the meaningfulness and connection to others and life itself and appear to be happy, but again, death doesn’t seem to make them move forward with any audacious goals to accomplish.
Even though we want death to motivate us, in thought, it doesn’t appear to push anyone along as much as we think it would. What defines motivation is the drive to take action to initiate and persist to accomplishing a goal. This takes patience, persistence and perseverance and what jump starts that and keeps it on track is one that is unique to each person and as mysterious as death.
