My memento mori
Remember that you are going to die
Your body will turn to ashes and disappear, your name will be forgotten along with everyone you have ever loved and everyone you have ever met. So will everything you have ever done and said. They will never have existed. Everything will become nothing. As is in accord with nature. Life is only borrowed. The only permanent is impermanence.
So make your time count. Stop making yourself miserable by thinking about what others think about you; what others have done better, faster or earlier than you. Don’t let a stranger’s glance disrupt your mind, or another’s success become your failure.
A man is born to do good. For himself, for his fellow man and for the nature which he is part of. No one is malicious and does harm with purpose and conviction. Only out of ignorance or misguidedness. And If a common good results in a personal negative, it is still good if I am the one who suffers the least by doing it.
A tree is good by growing, by shedding its leaves, growing new ones and finally dying, decomposing and giving life to new life. As is in accord with nature. An ant leads a good life by toiling away for the good of the colony, as is according to nature. A man leads a good life by toiling away at what is good and true and rejecting what is not, according to his nature. You are not an ant. You are a man, gifted with the vitality of the divine spark. You dictate what is a good life. You set your own terms. Carve out your own path. Your life is yours. Do not let the culture or society you were born into, or other people’s opinions, dictate what makes a good life.
No one knows what comes after death. There are theories, sure. But no one knows. Maybe it’s all an elaborate chemical reaction. The unbearable lightness of being, everything is nothing. Or maybe time is indeed neverending, and we will return forever.
All I can relate to is what nature has made me able to percieve and know. That is myself, in this life, with what I see as good and right. What comes after has not come yet. There is no reason to think of death, for I am still alive. And when I am dead I will not care.
Other people are not in your control, and therefore I should be prepared to say: “this is nothing to me” when I let a stranger disrupt my inner calm. Too much time is spent comparing myself to those better than me. Their accomplishments are nothing to me. Not in the sense that I don’t recognize them. Of course I do. But in the sense that they are not comparable to my accomplishments. I set my own bar.
All of the above are silly reflections made during a rainy train ride, and is mostly just blatant paraphrasing of philosophers and other smart people. I just need to keep in mind what is ultimately important to me, and what shouldn’t be. Things outside my control have been taking up too much of my attention lately, and this is something I need to think about, and work on my view from above.