Before I Die
Reflecting on what really matters.
There’ve been several times I’ve been pretty sure I was about to die.
Each time is really clarifying. There’s something super vivid about believing I’m facing the end, and noticing that I’m not ready. And specifically how I’m not ready. What’s left to do. The fact that I could have done more but somehow was too distracted. A desperation floods me to have more time, and to somehow use that time better than I tend to.
Over and over again, I see death as this kind of clarifying. When I’ve lost someone I love, and all the stories drop away. The aching hole where they once were is too vivid to ignore. I see the busyness that had me living in a fantasy life — and some part of me always knew that fantasy was kind of fake. And the way that real death is so strangely mundane and simple. It doesn’t even bring great drama. It’s just… naked. Silent. Empty.
In those moments of clarity, it’s always befuddling to me why I ever let my attention wander. I’ve wasted so much precious time on things that don’t matter. Of course, on some level everything matters: even mindless scrolling on social media has its place. But those excuses are pointlessly thin when facing the final end. When I see that my aspirations will never become real, or that I’ll never hold that one person I love ever again. What matters then isn’t that I was justified. What matters is whether I cherished each moment. And what went unsaid.
I have so, so much unsaid. When I believe I’m dying, that is always my greatest regret. I have gifts I mean to give. It would be devastatingly heartbreaking to go to the grave with them trapped inside me. Fading away forever into nothingness.
I want to work on saying them.
I feel pretty good about my ongoing relationships here. The people dear to me in my life know I love them. I can always love them better, with my words and my hands. But I don’t feel really constrained this way. In that I’m blessed.
But I have a lot unsaid to humanity.
There’s something deeply precious I very much want to share. I think it’s needed.
If I am to die, I want to dedicate the time I have left to sharing it. I want to know it will survive me.
A moment of pure stillness
There’s a franticness I see everywhere. Including in me.
When I’m talking about fun ideas with a friend, it’s a pleasant franticness. It’s very easy to sort of play out a busy process in my mind. Saying things because I’m excited about the thoughts.
But it’s the same franticness as in an argument. When I’m with a group of people and everyone is talking over each other. Trying to squeeze in their thoughts. Seeing so clearly that what they need to say will sort out the tangle, or will push back against something unfair.
It’s the thing that can have lovers being angry with each other. Snippy or hostile or mean.
Or even just mechanical. Problem-solving. Talking pragmatically without touching souls.
Feeling disconnected even while physically together.
There’s such a simple movement here that ends it all. Not always accessible, but absolutely precious. Worth reaching for.
It’s just to make eye contact, and take a breath, and be still.
Be still together.
Not to disregard the noise. But to have it no longer drive everything. At least for a moment.
Can there be a moment to remember together what matters?
What would we want here, if these were our final moments? If one or both of us were to suddenly die in a few minutes?
Yes, of course, we don’t really expect that. And that matters too. I don’t mean to suggest ignoring what’s real.
I actually mean the absolute opposite.
That franticness doesn’t understand what’s at stake, and how short time is. It might even freak out about time. But it loses context. It repeats noise. It acts based on some kind of program. It doesn’t keep track of what really truly matters. It just… loops.
I want to underline the heartbreak there.
It loops.
It loops.
It will keep doing this.
It will keep us doing the same thing over and over again until we die.
The same disconnection.
The same bracing.
And then we’ll look back on our lives and wonder “Why didn’t I pay attention to what really matters to my heart?”
“What did I do with my life, now that it’s over?”
We don’t have to go that route.
We can pause together.
Feel your breath right here, right now, as you’re reading these words.
Just pause.
Hello.
This matters.
Knowing we will die
It looks to me like most people don’t know they’re going to die.
I forget too. I don’t mean to put myself on some pedestal here. I have a strange gift of memory here, and I’m hoping to use it for good. But I forget too. That’s part of our shared plight.
I’m not talking about a factual knowing. Most people would know to answer “yes” to the question of whether they’ll die someday.
I mean more that there’s a kind of horrifying clarity, a visceral knowing, that crashes into someone when they get a terminal diagnosis. It’s something new.
The thing is, we already are going to die. What’s new here isn’t that Death is coming. What’s new with the diagnosis is that the person can feel it. It’s real to them. The inevitability grips their throat and chills their guts. They get that there is no escape.
“We have two lives, and the second begins when we realize we only have one.”
—Confucius
Best as I can tell, humanity lives in a strange shared dream fueled by franticness. We pretend it goes on forever, that “death” happens to some characters along the way like in a video game, that we should be upset by it when it’s the focus, but we should also carry on with our political struggles and our daily tasks and our jobs and so on as though everything goes on the same way as before.
I think this is why grief cuts through so much.
It cuts through because death is real. Unlike the frantic stories. We can gossip however much we want, be upset by an unreasonable family member or an annoying coworker… but if they have a heart attack and are gone, the silence does not care what stories we tell. We know they’re just that: stories. They can’t fill the aching hollow in our hearts. They can’t stop us from being forever changed.
I’ve known a few friends who’ve lost young children. Bereaved parents know what I mean. There’s a horrifying silence that crashes relentlessly against any stories. When you hurt that deeply, reassurances are obviously thin. Irrelevant. It’s sweet that people care, but they don’t understand. The emptiness of the child’s room is too real.
Most of the time, we collectively ignore all this.
It’s astonishing to me that we even can.
I think it’s possible because many people simply have never noticed that they will in fact die. Not really. Not the way it feels when you know you’re taking your final breath.
Not even a death scare seems to make this reliably clear. When someone survives a nasty car crash, or pulls through an emergency surgery, the expression is often “That was close.” Not “Oh. I thought that was the end. But not yet. I have a little more time.”
I dearly, dearly want humanity to consciously feel where it is. Where we are.
We are mortal.
That matters.
It’s not an idea.
It’s vividly, heartbreakingly real.
Frantic dreams
So much is crazy wrong with the world.
With more caution and mental precision, I could say something more literally true. How there are trauma responses and developmental limitations. How geopolitics forces certain behaviors. How we just haven’t yet found a better answer to creating abundance than corporate capitalism and a globally entangled supply chain.
But there’s an innocent truth here.
Humanity is confused.
Why does anyone starve?
Why can’t we unify around global warming — to fix the real problems, and also to reassure and comfort those who are terrified as though the situation is much worse than it really is?
Today we’re building AI. We’re granting our global economic engine the power to decide whether humanity survives, and whether we have any control over our own future.
It’s a large-scale version of a group of people yelling at each other. Frantically trying to get their ideas heard.
Something is wrong. The world is crazy.
It hurts.
But we don’t collectively pause. Listening to the world the way we might attune to a distressed child when we don’t know how to help them.
Instead it looks to me like humanity is tight in frantic illusions. News stories and politics and pointing fingers. Panic and judgment and numbness. Machinery that locks us out of our hearts and drains our bodies’ power into patterns of distrust and disconnection.
I dearly want to grab each soul by the shoulders, look into their eyes, crying from my heart.
“Please. Please, just stop. You are going to die. Take a breath. Please, meet me here. Meet us here. There has never been much time. But there is a little time right here, right now. Just pause with me. Please. We need you.”
“Sit down,
be still,
and listen.You are drunk
and this is
the edge of the roof.”—Rumi
Praying together
In the silence, something new is possible.
When I set aside my wild mind and my lighting words, and I look another soul in the eyes, and we pause together…
…I can feel how I don’t know what to do.
And that what’s at hand deeply matters.
The combination of those two is heartbreaking.
But if I’m willing to let my heart be broken, I can stay with the truth. I can face it. I can know that this matters, that something precious might be harmed or destroyed, that I want to address it… and that I do not really know how.
If I hold that vividly, I can listen.
To myself, to the other, and to emptiness itself.
If the other does the same, we can share that aching not-knowing, and that listening.
It’s in these moments that real connection happens. And where real insight can arise.
I think this deserves to be called “prayer”. I pray for an answer. We pray for an answer. Not with words, but with our hearts. Not to some idea of a God, but to the unknown. To each other. With each other.
When we pray this way together, new answers can come. We don’t have to follow those looping frantic behaviors forever.
We can pause.
And listen.
And do something new together.
My heart aches fiercely for a shared moment, just a few seconds, where humanity can pause and look around together. Where we can set aside our stories for just a few moments, and breathe, and make real contact as one shared people.
“Oh. This is real. This matters. It really truly matters. And we honestly don’t know what to do.”
If we should all die
Some people worry that AI might kill us all.
Sometimes I worry about that too.
For a moment, if you’re willing, maybe set aside whether you think that’s likely. Or whether you think it could be specifically AI.
Instead, I ask you to listen. Just for a moment.
Imagine that we’re somehow facing our collective end. It just dawned on us that we’ve messed up. It’s too late, and we’re now watching the last days or minutes playing out.
At that end, there might finally be a clarity. A pause.
An “Oh.”
It becomes real.
Like the patient who hears that they have two weeks to live. It’s not a theory anymore. They didn’t even realize their mortality was a mere idea before. But now it’s real.
In those final hours, we might finally take that collective breath.
Really seeing together that this is it. There’s nothing more to do.
And in that stillness, we might pray as one.
Not with words. Not to some shared idea of a God.
But with each other. In the brief yet long silence. Facing the end.
And we’d have a clarity we wish we’d had sooner.
That we wish we’d had sooner.
Sooner.
As in here.
Here.
That we would wish then that we have now.
We are not right now at that end. Even if it is coming, we are not there now.
If we are heading that way, we can choose to notice it.
To realize deeply that we are mortal. To really get it.
To let the horror move through us.
The heartbreak.
The devastation.
And to listen deeply. To care with all our hearts, and to not know what to do.
If we can just breathe, just pause and breathe together…
…maybe something else can become possible.
Choosing to know we will die
My vision is simple.
I want humanity to realize that it is going to die.
Not to panic. Not to collapse. Neither of those matter.
I mean something very simple. Wholesome. Devastating. Real.
I want to see us attending to what matters, and letting go of frantic fever dreams.
I want those tight, rushed words to stop being what we believe. As though they tell us what deeply matters. Or what to do.
I want us to learn to see this confusion, and notice our plight. That we do not know how to stop being crazy this way.
But also not to laughingly shrug off that we’re crazy, like it’s just a joke. The laughter is good, but not if we act as though our plight isn’t devastatingly meaningful too. As though it will not literally kill everyone we love and could come to love — one by one even if not all at once.
I think — and hope — that everything I do is with an eye to this. To helping humanity learn to take a collective breath, for the sake of all that is holy and precious.
I am not convinced we have time.
We never know how much time we have.
But I imagine that with each person who comes into vivid contact with death’s clarity, we have a collective nudge to pretend just a little bit less.
We waste a little less time.
We can touch. Just a little more.
I’m calling for us to reach for this. To learn Death’s lesson before Death becomes our teacher.
You do not want to realize you will die because you are about to die.
You want that clarity much, much sooner.
Please. Pause and notice.
This moment, too, is precious.
You are alive.
But maybe not for much longer.
How much have you lost track of what deeply matters to you? Where have you made choices you could tell were wrong for your heart? The ones you’ll regret in your final moments, even if they sounded so sensible and justified at the time?
Can you feel the heartbreak there?
Please, stay with that.
Just pause.
Breathe.
Let it in.
Let in what you can tell deeply matters.
What I hope to give
If the above were to ripple out into humanity, I would feel pretty complete.
I have a lot I’d love to do. For myself and with others. I would not get bored for centuries at least.
But if Death’s clarity were really present and conscious in our collective heart, I would feel like my sacred purpose had been fulfilled.
I’d have a solid sense of “Okay, now humanity’s got it. We’re good.”
I could die knowing I’d lived well.
My guess is that it’s gonna take many tries. I’m going to have to rephrase this, and vibe it, and spell out nuances, and share videos, and create art, and and and…
…and I hope there’s time.
As long as there’s time, I’ll keep trying.
I believe in us.
This was really beautiful, thank you.