We're All Dying

I watched the movie Blade Runner recently. The most powerful line was toward the end - the protagonist falls in love with a woman who only has 4 years to live, and another character tells the protagonist, "It's too bad she won't live. But then again, who does?"

When I heard this line, it rekindled an old thought I've tackled with from time to time. We're all dying. It is a strange thing, though. Most people don't have any idea when it might be. It could be tomorrow, or it could be 40 years from now. But everybody assumes it will be in 40 years (or longer). It's probably the only way some people can go on living, by ignoring their mortality, by procrastinating on accepting their lives as finite. And that is what makes it such a dramatic setting to give a character a specific amount of time to live.

When somebody knows they will die in 6 months, they suddenly feel this rush to accept their mortality and have the experiences they always dreamed of. But that's actually a weird thing. Why are people putting off their dreams? Why are they not dealing with the reality of life being painfully short, whether we live for 4 years or 100?

As people without an ETA for death, we see a person that has 6 months to live and we think that they aren't going to make it. And all the while, they are completely oblivious to the fact that they aren't going to make it either, because "making it" seems to mean not dying.

So why do I bring this up? It's because the reality is that everybody here is going to die. What really matters is what you choose to do with that time that you do have. It's as true for you and me as it is for the characters we write and read about. If birth and death are the first and last pages of the story that is our lives, then no matter how many chapters there are, that book will end. Try to make those pages in between worth reading.