How much of your time on this Earth can you look back on with pride? If you were given a date with your exact time of death, would you be more, or less motivated to accomplish something?
Memento mori is the reminder of inevitable death. The reminder that your time on this Earth is limited and your chance to leave an impression upon it is short. You can either take advantage of, or squander your time, but you must understand that you have one shot to leave a mark.
Take a gander at the chart below, and realize perhaps for the first time, just how finite your life truly is. If the average lifespan is 79 years, how much of it do you think is wasted on average? The average person in the US spends 2.5 hours of their time on social media and after just 1 year, that plays out to 2.4 weeks. Start tossing other distractions into the pile as well. How much time do you spend consuming video games, pornography, or television? How much time do you waste twiddling your thumbs at work when you could either do more to stand out, or otherwise focus yourself?
A man may die once, but his works can live on, and therefore he may live on through them. If you live a Godly life, leave a family in good standing and pass away a good man, will your children and their families not honor you and thereby extend the period of time upon this Earth that your name is honored? Sharon from accounting may cash in a 6 figure income and go on lady cruises with her wino friends, but at the end of the day, her cats won’t echo her name after death. Her hedonistic lifestyle won’t open any pearly gates either. Those who shun the excesses and decadence of earthly pleasures will not die alone or disappear into the void.
“Ye shall therefore keep my statutes, and my judgments: which if a man do, he shall live in them: I am the LORD.”
Leviticus 18:5
Marks can be as simple as procreating and leaving progeny behind. Kids and grandkids who can tell the story of a good man or woman who gave them the gifts of love and life. Why not create a family and commit yourself to doing such works that they pass down your story for generations to come.
If you are here, you’re probably leagues ahead of your contemporaries, but do not rest on the laurels of self satisfaction. Push forward each day without forgetting that the end of life is inevitable, but there is glory and eternal life awaiting those who did not waste time on godless pursuits.
“Time is lost time; the very day which we are now spending is shared between ourselves and death. It is not the last drop that empties the water-clock, but all that which previously has flowed out; similarly, the final hour when we cease to exist does not of itself bring death; it merely of itself completes the death-process. We reach death at that moment, but we have been a long time on the way”
–Seneca
We are witnessing, not the natural end of a great human civilization, but the birth of an inhuman civilization that could never have come into being without a vast, an immense, a universal sterilization of life’s highest values
