(photo: @deskfire)
One of the hardest things to think about with sufficient seriousness and intent is the meaning of our lives. We are generally too mired in the day to day, too pressed up against immediate deadlines, to be able to gain the altitude necessary to consider the overall course we are plotting through our ever more limited years: to ask ourselves with generosity but also a little rigour and salutary impatience what we are actually trying to achieve in our careers or what kind of relationships we deep down feel we should be in.
The major obstacle to rigorous thinking is the feeling that we are immortal. We may not experience ourselves as exactly this inured to the reality of death, but in the lackadaisical way we approach the choices and hurdles before us, in the amount that we defer and evade, we are implicitly behaving as if the business of waking every new day had privately been guaranteed to us to go on forever. Why else would we fail again and again to say what needs to be said or to square up to the untenable compromises we are involved in?
We are not terrified enough for our own good. We are behaving like gods or superhuman entities who have centuries to get it right. We are alternately too timid and too arrogant. We are of course ultimately simply scared; scared of doing something and getting it wrong, taking a decision and realising that it didn’t improve anything. However our inaction is also a form of choice, and not necessarily of the optimal kind either.
To overcome our tendencies to delay and evade, we need – perhaps – to bring the pressure of another – and even greater – fear to the situation. We need to scare ourselves of something very large in order to liberate ourselves to think with greater energy about the myriad of immediate challenges before us. That is why, for hundreds of years, a most suitable piece of interior decoration for any thinking person’s study was held to be a skull: a real-life skull with ghoulish eye sockets and anguished looking rotten teeth, so that as we went about our business, we would never be far from a reminder that our time to get it right was very limited indeed.
For much of our lives, however much the intellectual idea is in place, the reality of our own death remains only in shadow: death is something that happens chiefly and rightly to other people. It’s not a concrete, powerful conviction that shudders through us every hour. And though this may seem rather pleasant and allows us to bring a touching innocence to our routines, it is also the breeding ground for the most profoundly unfortunate kinds of faulty thinking.
If we’ve got more or less forever, we don’t have to make any tricky changes or reforms: we can linger in a relationship that’s not really working. We might waste many evenings half-heartedly amusing ourselves in trivial ways, imagining that we’ll get round to more ambitious pursuits at some point in the future. Perhaps we don’t have the kinds of friendships we’d really like, but we can live with the dissatisfaction out of a spoilt belief that we have decades still to get our interactions right. The gruesome skull is meant to bring all such misplaced confidence to a conclusive end.
It should also liberate us somewhat not to mind too much if we hit do obstacles in more ambitious ventures, for if everything is any case doomed to end in the grave, then it might not matter overly if we were to approach an attractive stranger and were rebuffed, or if we tried our hand at a new task and discovered we had no talent. The thought of death may be at once terrifying and the harbinger of a distinct kind of light-heartedness and requisite irresponsibility.
A picture from our childhood could be the ideal companion to this skull. When we were little, we had no sense whatsoever that we might really one day be an adult. At five, turning twenty or thirty was an impossible supposition. And yet it has happened sure enough. And just as this has come to pass, so our death will happen too. The childhood picture and the skull combine to force the reality of our end powerfully to the front of our recalcitrant brains, not to make us miserable but to render us vitally more active, strategic, focused and determined in the precious present; in short, to help to save us.
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