I’ve always had a sense of impending death. As a teenager I used to lie awake at night calculating what percentage of my life I had left depending on what age I die.
As an adult my life has been haunted by the notion that my time here is finite and that I should do something amazing with it.
Life has a way of distracting you though, a way of helping you forget the morbidity of it all. I can go months without thinking about it, caught up in life. The joys of family and the outdoors, the sloth of television and entertainment, the ritual of work — everyday life.
And yet the feeling always comes back to me, punching me in the gut. No time more so than when I am hiking in the English countryside and a deep introspection comes over me as I ponder the meaning of life, who I am and where I am going.
It happened to me this weekend too. I was walking in deepest darkest Lancashire when I came upon the village of Newchurch in Pendle, famous for it’s witch trials 400 years ago, and its picturesque 17th century church.
Graveyards
I found myself meandering through its graveyard looking at the headstones, trying to find the person born the furthest away from me and imagine all the events they lived through.
I wonder about their hopes and dreams, their love, their hate, their successes, their failures. We’re they rich? Were they poor? How did they live? How did they die?
And now I suppose nothing they did matters.
Their lives have been erased in the sands of time. Their dreams have vanished, their memories faded, their deeds done.
As I moved through the autumnal leaves I imagined a time when it was my name on a head stone. All my hopes and dreams gone. It terrifies me to think that I could take all my dreams to the grave.
I came upon the grave of a man who died at my age (33). I felt a deep sorrow for his loss. He must have had unfulfilled hopes and dreams too, and what of them now?
I sat on a bench next to the grave or purported witch Alice Nutter, I felt the acute sense that there is only the here and now. What we do matters, to us and those around us, right now.
If we don’t live in the moment then we never truly live. Our hopes and dreams won’t matter once the moment is gone, once we’re gone.
What those people in the graves did in their moment will have mattered to them in their time. But at the same time what they didn’t do in their moment will have haunted them. It must have done for what I dream of and haven’t done yet haunts me everyday.
How many times have you put off what you wanted to do in life because it wasnt the right time, because you weren’t ready?
But what if you were to die tomorrow? What hopes and dreams would die with you?
Nothing answers these questions for me like a walk in the graveyard.
As I closed the creaky church gate I left Newchurch with a new found clarity. Clarity of what I want to do with my life. But not only clarity, courage too. The courage to pursue my dreams.
Because like all those lives, dreams too will fade and in another 200 years someone else will come upon my headstone and wonder what I did and, more importantly, didn’t do with my life.
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