The Question That Brings Me Peace

Asking myself a single question often brings me immediate peace of mind.

One of the things age grants you is the opportunity for deeper self-reflection. When we reach well past the midway point in our lives, so many things come into sharper focus if we take the time to ponder them.

Sadly, some people never engage in meaningful self-reflection. It always astonishes me when I encounter someone who clearly has never taken the time to look back on their lives to arrive at useful lessons and guidance for moving forward in better ways. If you don’t embrace self-reflection, I urge you to do so. But I digress.

The reason for this post is to simply recount how my own elder years have informed me in one useful way. Having recently turned 70 years of age, the reality of impending death, which is hopefully still many years in the future, forces anyone with a smidgen of engaged consciousness to think about their life in new ways.

Among the thoughts banging around in my head now is a question I continually ask myself, sometimes daily. That question is this.

How much about me or what I’ve done will be remembered 100 or 500 years from now?

Morbid? I don’t think so. I see the fact that at some point in the future people won’t think about me or what I’ve done much at all as comforting. My friends and loved ones will hopefully remember me for as long as they’re alive, but they too will succumb to the fate every person eventually encounters — death. The generation that follows might stumble upon my name or something I’ve done or created and think about me for a blip of a moment, but they’ll quickly move on to the affairs of the day as they should. Eventually the day will come when, except for perhaps the rarest of circumstances, I’ll not be remembered at all.

Death just is. There’s no escaping it. They’re no denying it. We might attempt to delay death, but the truth is death can be the result of utter randomness and chance. While I, unlike much of modern culture, do not ascribe any morality or culpability to death, I of course can’t escape society’s haranguing message that it’s incumbent upon us all to do everything we can to cheat death to the best of our ability.

Every bit of food or drink that enters my mouth is accompanied by a quick internal assessment of its healthiness. When I stare at my body in the mirror in the morning, I consistently mutter that I should exercise more. As I peruse my notes, action list, and calendar each morning and night, a nagging voice in my head wonders if I’m doing enough, improving enough, contributing enough.

When my mind stalls in the face of such self-judgment, I nowadays return to asking that single question.

If an item on a to do list remains undone, eventually it won’t matter. If I eat that one slice of pizza that shortens my life by 36 seconds, eventually it won’t matter. If I write 500 articles and essays and not the 1,000 I dreamed I’d write, eventually no one will care.

I’m sure there are those reading this who believe in an afterlife. I should probably state here that I do not. I don’t think there’s a heaven-like destination for a surviving essence. I believe we get one turn on this planet and that’s it. This obviously colors my views about life but let me suggest that even if you do hold on to an afterlife future, that still means no one on the planet will remember you at all someday.

Capitalism alone is a monumental force that works night and day to make us feel bad about ourselves so that we’ll continue to buy often unnecessary products or services. Again, ask yourself the question I posed at the heart of this post. Will anyone in the future care that you wore the most expensive cosmetics? Will anyone care if you drove a $100,000 car or a $30,000 car? Will anyone care that your trainer chiseled you into a ripped and shredded physical specimen? Will anyone care that you had a fancy job title? No, no one will care.

Maybe the question I pose here won’t bring you comfort as it does me. Having had conversations with people to whom I divulged the question I ask myself, I know others have found comfort in it. Answering the question each time you catch yourself in a spiral of self-judgment or stressed from a packed daily schedule that’s never enough time to do it all, perhaps ask the question of yourself. It’s worth a try in case it might bring you the peace it brings me.

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