Here is an excerpt from my book, The Silent Master: Awakening the Power Within:
Death Is Right Beside Us
You may think those are fairly easy questions. After all, don’t you look in the mirror every day and more or less size yourself up? Plan your agenda? But I suspect these questions aren’t as easy as you think, and that most of us carefully dance around the honest answers to avoid confronting ourselves.
Many of us are seduced into a sense of “foreverness” about our lives, thinking that we have unlimited time to get somewhere or do something. Not that we say that consciously to ourselves. We don’t say “I’m going to be alive forever,” we just act that way. We simply do not have the feeling from day to day that we are eventually going to die, or that our time here is limited.
Since we don’t live from moment to moment with the awareness that we could die at anytime, we take our time answering the questions mentioned above or avoid them altogether. Even if we ask a question like, “Am I where I want to be?” it’s all too easy to reply “Well, I’ll get there someday,” and leave the matter right there. We tend to put the fulfillment of our real goals off to “When I retire,” or “When the kids are out of the house,” or “When I have time,” and so on.
