Don’t Wait Until Your Deathbed To Realize Relaxing Your Grip On Life Leads To Inhabiting It More Fully

We’re all going to die in the middle of a news cycle.

We won’t get to see how it all turns out. We’ll have unresolved conflicts. We might not get to sufficiently thank someone for their impact on our lives.

In spite of these unresolved storylines, we will likely discover a willingness to relinquish our need for everything to be made right.

You don’t have to keep holding on

There’s a phenomenon everyone seems to be aware of, whether it’s something you’ve seen in movies, heard about from friends, or observed directly.

A person who is dying keeps hanging on at the end of their life until someone gives them explicit permission to stop fighting.

Making peace with not knowing

The person makes a mysterious, internal shift and quietly fades away. Loved ones who witness this describe it as beautiful and poignant.

It’s deeply human to maintain a tight, internal grip without realizing it.

Often it signals a gap between what’s happening and what we would prefer to be happening instead.

If relaxing this grip at the end of life allows it to wind down with a bit more ease, maybe it’s possible to amortize this lesson over years and decades.

Not waiting until the end

Contemplative practices like mindfulness meditation cultivate more than temporary relaxation. They develop intimacy with being alive.

At any given moment, you can ask yourself, What would this moment be like if I relaxed my grip on it and allowed it to unfold naturally?

Explore this during pleasant moments and unpleasant ones.

Get curious about subtle impacts to the experience of chopping carrots, taking out the trash, or turning off a light.

If you’re not able to ease up, then it’s not within your control. Try to ease up on not being able to ease up.

You have the rest of your life to explore, in this way, the beauty, wonder, and poignancy of being alive.