One Day Soon, You Won't Be Here
Better start that thing...
My sense of mortality has been enhanced since my mother passed away a couple of years ago. My father is biding his time. He talks about the inevitability of it almost every time we meet, not in a melancholic way but in a practical accepting way. I think about myself and the life I have lived, and I think about how he must feel now that he’s in his final years. He could have ten, or even twenty left… but maybe not. What must it be like for him now that his work is gone, his family are gone, and his wife is gone? His reasons for being have gone, and one day, he’ll be gone. One day I’ll be gone too. The sense of our finite existence is present in me now more than ever, and I’m asking myself, what am I waiting for?
“It's being here now that's important. There's no past, and there's no future. Time is a very misleading thing. All there is ever, is the now. We can gain experience from the past, but we can't relive it, and we can hope for the future, but we don't know if there is one.” ― George Harrison
When we’re young, we don’t think about death much, if at all. We just tear into life. And that’s how it should be. Full of beans, we jump into everything, rarely sensing danger. Christ, when I think about the things I got up to in my youth, it’s a wonder how I’m still here. But there comes a point where the futility of work and business wears us out, and our sense of the infinity of life begins to shrink. Arguably, I have half my life over now, so I better get that thing done. I’ve been fucking around with it waiting to be ready for too long. One day I’ll disappear and risk not having the experience of finishing it. The voice in my head tells me it will be crap, and no one will want it, so what is the point? Another quieter voice keeps bringing me back. Whispering, get me done.
Get it done before you expire - I work with people one-to-one from my practice location in Phibsboro, Dublin 7. I also work with people remotely via Zoom. So, if you, like me, feel the quiet urgency of something that keeps calling, find out how to develop the skills to answer it.