Life and Death....

If you had one moment to live would you be enjoy that moment or would you be upset about the fact that you had only one moment to live and not more. Now stretch this moment to a life time. You have this one life to live, are you going to enjoy it or are you going to be upset that you are going to die.

My wife and I were having this conversation about why people get upset when they learn they are going to die and it does not make sense to me that when we know we have two three months to live we waste our time being upset about it. I have three months to live and instead of going and living it and enjoying the life I have, I will instead spend it by living in the future when I dont have this life when I will be dead. That future is going to come anyway, so why dont I wait till I die to die.

If you think about how much we crib and complain about uncertainty and then you are told you are going to die. There is certainty finally we know something for sure, you would think we would be happy and yet we choose to be unhappy. So may be we are not unhappy about uncertainty or unhappy about dieing. We are just unhappy. We are in a habit of being unhappy.

I think unhappiness is a habit people learn from childhood. We learn to complain, criticize, judge. So to be happy all you have to do is to consciously choose it. Make it a habit.

Stages of Grief

The five stages of grief was first introduced by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross in her 1969 book On Death and Dying. It describes a process by which people deal with grief and tragedy.

The five stages are as follows, Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression and Acceptance. I think we all go through these five stages but I wonder why we do it in these five stages.

When I talk to people they clearly accept that the need to go through these stages but the first four stages clearly make us unhappy and the fifth gives us peace. So why do we not just go to the fifth stage? Why do we have to go through pain and suffering before we say we have enough with pain and suffering and accept? Is it possible to bypass the first four stages and come directly to the fifth stage? When I ask people about it, they look at me like I am crazy. But why should we say that it is inevitable to go through these stages just because thats what we have been doing it all these years. We might have a predisposition to it but cant we overcome our predisposition?

Why should we go through these first four stages of suffering and emotional pain before we decide we have enough of pain? Why should we not just move directly to stage five?