Thinking About Our Mortality

The Music Inside …

“For nearly 25 years, I’ve been doing interviews with senior citizens, asking them to look back over their lives and talk about what they’ve learned. I’ve conducted more than 1,000 interviews with people who were successful in their jobs, who retired from leading companies after distinguished careers. Almost without exception, when these older people look back, they say the same things – things that are instructive and useful for the rest of us.

First, they say that if they could live their lives over again, they would be more reflective. They got so caught up in the doing, they say, that they often lost sight of the meaning. Looking back, they wish they had stopped at regular intervals to look at the big picture.

They also sounded a warning: Life picks up speed. The first half of your life is about getting established. Then time shifts gears. You hit the second half of your life, and everything moves faster. Days turn into weeks, weeks into months, and all of a sudden, you’re 65 years old. Looking back, you realize that time is the most precious currency in life.

Second, if they could live their lives over again, they would take more risks. In relationships, they would have been more courageous. And in expressing their creative side, they would have taken more chances. I think it was Oliver Wendell Holmes who said, ‘Most of us go to our graves with our music still inside us.’ Many of these people felt that, despite their successes, their music was still inside them. Almost all of them said that they felt most alive when they took risks. Just being busy from business made them numb. Aliveness came with learning, growing, stretching, exploring.

Third, if they could live their lives over again, they would understand what really gave them fulfillment. I call that the power of purpose: doing something that contributes to life, adding value that extends beyond yourself. Purpose is always outside yourself, beyond your ego or your financial self-interest.”

Excerpt from “You Decide: Work & Life: by Richard Leider in FastCompany, February:March 1998

Day by day, tiny specks of us float away. No matter which exercise or diet regimen we follow, no matter which self-help guru we believe in, nothing will dispel the reality that we are not built to last.

Yet knowing the extent of our limitations, feeling our soon-not-be-here-ness in our bones, is the best condition we can have for waking up to the miracle that we are here now at all. And if you think about it, that is the brilliance of the human design plan: The built-in “defect” is the very thing that can spur us to drink down the full draft as it comes to us. Better to taste it now, this life that we have, than to defer it to some future that may never come.

Excerpt from “Seven Sins for a Life Worth Living”, Roger Housden

The acknowledgement of death can be an enormous asset in one’s life. It pushes us to search for meaningfulness. And the search for meaning in whatever we do becomes the universal preoccupation of the Second Adulthood. It is rooted in a spiritual imperative that grows stronger as we grow older. Some people are moved to make a spiritual quest. Others do not relate this hunger to any religious belief but feel the need to stretch beyond self and even relationships, reaching toward a deeper appreciation of a collective intelligence working in the universe.

Excerpt from Parade Magazine, Dec. 11, 2005; Gail Sheehy, contributor