Death As Motivation

Death. It ever so silently motivates us to live. I haven't been feeling well the past 3 days. First day, body aches and malaise. That night, a fever of 99.9. Not significant to doctors standards, but significant enough for me to worry. Chills develop, I’m hot and cold. Fatigue sets in. I lay around all day watching the first season of The OA for the second time. Brit Marling is brilliant. It hurts to breathe in. Considering the current global environment, my mind wanders, "I must have contracted COVID-19." I get scared and then feel optimistic, I guess I'll develop some immunity if I have it.

I sleep. I feel better the next morning. I still have body aches, no fever. I watch The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and think about where my life has brought me. The passage Caroline reads from Benjamin's journal at the end, never fails to instruct tears from my eyes.

“For what it’s worth: it’s never too late or, in my case, too early to be whoever you want to be. There’s no time limit, stop whenever you want. You can change or stay the same, there are no rules to this thing. We can make the best or the worst of it. I hope you make the best of it. And I hope you see things that startle you. I hope you feel things you never felt before. I hope you meet people with a different point of view. I hope you live a life you’re proud of. If you find that you’re not, I hope you have the courage to start all over again.” - Benjamin Button.

The movie so simply illustrates how death is a motivation to live. Daisy is dying, and Caroline rushes to finish Benjamin's journal entries before her mother breathes her last breath. Death is Caroline’s motivation to keep on reading, no matter how painful and telling the story becomes for her.

Scene from The Curious Case of Benjamin Button - Caroline reading to Daisy

I'm a bit better after the movie; still achey, but I manage the energy to water my plants, do some weeding, and slip into our homemade cold plunge. I cook and we eat carrot, onion & ginger soup for dinner with a side of cabbage. I go to sleep, thinking I will be much better in the morning. I wake up with what I believe to be sinus headaches and a head full of congestion. My eye muscles are tender and sore when I press on and rotate them. Now I'm convinced I probably just have sinusitis.

I do my morning routine. We go to the ocean to swim it off, thinking it will clear my head. I haven't been to the sea in probably 3 months. Most people that live in Hawaii don't go to the beach as often as you'd think, unless they surf. I do not. The water depicted the clarity of a quartz crystal, that I have not seen in Hawaii since I was a child. The halt of tourism has been a gift for that of reducing an enormous amount of sunscreen that finds a way into the oceans. It slips right off human skin, into the water, and hurts the sea life. I always knew it was the f**king sunscreen.

Once we return home after a trip to town, I feel shit, as my husband would casually say whenever he doesn't feel well. I realized today how face masks produce just enough claustrophobia for me to get anxious. Then the nausea sets into the pit of my stomach, eye balls still sore every time I move them. I jump in the cold plunge in the garden to shake it off. I'm just feeling run down the past few days. But I can't accept that.

I feel chilled. I sit on the chair that our friend Ben gave us. It's the most comfortable piece of furniture in the house besides our Avocado mattress. Suddenly, since I have been feeling unwell for the past 3 days, I go completely quiet and develop a sense of concern. What if I have the "c" word?

Whenever I'm in a place of feeling unsettled or unwell, anxiety knows it's way through my body. I have a really healthy relationship with it these days, but I'll never be fully immune. It's part of my DNA (which I work at upgrading once in a while ;). It's a scary word, cancer. My life has been touched lightly by it, yet significantly. Then my mind slides down the rabbit hole; what if I really did have it and didn't know it? What about everything I wanted to accomplish so badly before I go wherever we all go at the end of life. We live everyday like we have a million years left and truth is, we have not a clue how many hours, days, or years we have. We live as though we are immortal, yet the reality of mortality seems to drive most of us to accomplish great things. We want to "live" so bad. But, we are living. We want to achieve things, but we do everyday. We want to create this, invent that, love him, help her. All of it, we must do all of it before the day arrives when we take our last breath like Daisy.

What if I don't get to accomplish all of my dreams? In the end, does it matter? Eric Roth had the answer to this too.

“You can be as mad as a mad dog at the way things went, you can curse the fates, but when it comes to the end, you have to let go.” - Captain Mike from Benjamin Button

I wish my brain would accept the "art of being" more often. I have glimpses of the magic that resides in a simple life. Which often gets derailed by my engagement in the "art of comparison". Media on a large and small scale. I remember a kitchen sink I saw on Instagram, then I feel sad that my small sink isn't worthy of an Instagram picture. Then low self-esteem knocks on the door, I come down on myself for not having the audacity to create that beautiful sink in my life right now. Then my drive starts. There is the fuel for me to keep going. Keep working, keep moving forward with all the dreams I want to fulfill. Then I will have that sink I once saw on Instagram. Would I have all these dreams if I didn't absorb any of the influence around me?

Then the reality of time sets in and I feel I’ll never make it, or if I do, it will be a few decades from now. I don't even know who coined the term we use of "making it" to a certain level of achievement that makes our life mean more than just being alive. Being a person learning how to love and be loved. I don't know what's actually more important than that.

It's easy to write out my awareness of this. It's much harder to walk in that knowing. We're surrounded by so many distractions, it's hard to keep up. And I don't mean with the K's. Often, when I get really excited about something I'm creating; you know that feeling where all your cells feel alive? It scares me shitless. I become clouded in fear, I start thinking that I won't get to finish before I die. Something will stop me. This is obviously a psychological space; the phrase that comes to mind is "waiting for the next shoe to drop". What I have created in my life up until this point, has been so good for me. I'm scared to allow more goodness to arrive. More happiness, more contentment. If everything I so desperately want to create gets created, I'm afraid something bad is going to happen.

Maybe this is the life of someone who creates, maybe this is the journey I’m meant for. I don't really know, and it would be cool if my mind would just relax about it.

So I'll go on; living, slowly sowing the seeds of my dreams as time goes by. Maybe that's all I can do. And I'll enjoy the process. Because I think that's where the true gold lies.

Enjoyment in the process of creating while we’re alive, must be the actual reward.