We won’t be prepared to die until we have truly lived. For some paradoxical reason, people who have experienced life intensely and fully are the ones who are most able to let go of it. They seem to die with the same passion with which they lived. Those who most fear death are those who have not yet begun to live. Those who have lived a full life have learned already how to include death; death is not a stranger.
People with unlived lives unconsciously know that true insight and vitality have somehow eluded them, leaving them without a center or even a sense of why they were ever born. Their real self—soul—has not been awakened and so they lack a deep sense of themselves, or any eternal purpose. Having not yet begun to live, they can’t imagine dying. It is still foreign territory, a destination preceded by no journey toward it. Anxiety haunts their nights and days, searching in outer places for what they can only find within.
