The Irony of Life – Get Busy Living or Get Busy Dying
The Paradox of Life and Death
I love seasons. Growing up in Huntington Beach, where the weather was a near-constant 70 degrees, mostly sunny, with the occasional rain shower, I never fully experienced their rhythm. But recently, watching the snow melt and winter surrender to spring’s warmth in Montana, I was reminded of their importance. I’ve always loved winter—the cold, the snow, the stillness. Yet spring arrives with its own quiet wisdom, a reminder that life stirs beneath even the deepest frost. It carries renewal, but also the loss of winter’s calm, gently nudging us back into motion.
Year after year, we attune our lives and our bodies to nature’s cycles: birth, senescence, death, and rebirth. Annually, we are reminded of the impermanence of things—the slow mourning of winter and the endless potential that lies within the dormant seed, patiently waiting for the right conditions to emerge. Every tiny life holds within it a blueprint for something magnificent to come, its pure potential realized through slow determination and unrelenting fortitude.
But life is full of paradox—just as we find ourselves blooming and growing, we also hold the awareness that we are aging and dying.
What Gives Life Meaning?
Life is a series of choices, experiences, and memories. But meaning isn’t found in the moments themselves—it’s woven from the perspective we bring to them. Like a film, our lives are composed of raw footage: scattered, unstructured, waiting to be shaped. It’s in post-production that the story emerges. Are we crafting a highlight reel, or replaying a shame loop? Without a guiding vision, we risk filming scenes without direction, leaving the final cut fragmented and incoherent.
This is where our values come into play. Because, what does it all boil down to if we are not living in our values? If we are not living with love in our hearts, sharing and shining our purpose and meaning?
Your values define what matters to you, but some values are universal. As explored by the Dalai Lama and Desmond Tutu in The Eight Pillars of Joy, these include perspective, humility, humor, acceptance, forgiveness, gratitude, compassion, and generosity. These pillars exist independent of circumstance, always available to embody and share.
Jim Collins, in Good to Great, writes: “…in the end, it is impossible to have a great life unless it is a meaningful life. And it is very difficult to have a meaningful life without meaningful work…you might even gain that deepest of satisfactions: knowing that your short time here on this earth has been well spent, and that it mattered.”
Carl Jung popularized the idea of “die before you die,” urging individuals to “kill off” self-limiting beliefs and attachments in favor of a more authentic, meaningful life. Our values are the road map that allows us to act with purpose.
The Fear of Death and the Joy of Living
In my years of self-destruction, alcohol and recklessness ruled my life. I assumed I would die young, and I wasn’t afraid of it. There was a grim certainty—I would suffer until my time ran out. But suffering is neither the joy of living nor the peace of the dead.
Finding sobriety, restoring my integrity, and co-creating a loving family allowed me to embrace life fully. I finally ‘died before I died.’ Yet, in experiencing the depth of love and joy, I awakened a new fear: losing it. The more I cherished life, the more I resisted its impermanence. The irony, of course, is that the fear of death only emerges when we finally begin to live.
Life is a paradox, and paradoxes hold opposites intertwined—aliveness and death, fear and love, scarcity and abundance. One extreme juxtaposes the other. The pendulum swinging violently back and forth between extremes is an exhausting ride. The antidote is faith, purpose, meaning, and legacy.
Faith gives us the power to surrender and accept the inevitabilities of life. Legacy helps us contribute to a future we will no longer exist in. What ripples out from your life and echoes into eternity?
Existential anxiety often intensifies with age. It can be exacerbated by the fear of losing the relationships and memories of a life well-lived, or by regret for what we haven’t yet experienced. Psychedelics have played a pivotal role in alleviating that existential anxiety, especially when it interferes with the precious time we have to live. Mortality is inevitable, but how we spend our time is something we can change.
Because life isn’t about accumulating material wealth or hoarding “things” for the grave. It’s about the relationships we cultivate, the love we give and receive, and the ripples of impact we leave behind. The philosophy of Ubuntu declares, "A person is a person through other persons," emphasizing the significance of interdependence and connection in shaping who we are.
Or, as Elisabeth Kübler-Ross so beautifully put it:
"When you love,
give it everything you've got,
and when you've reached your limit,
give it more
and forget the pain of it,
because as you face your death, it's only the love which will count.
All the rest,
the accomplishments and struggles, the fights,
will be forgotten in your reflection,
and if you have loved well, then it will have been worth it,
and the joy of it will last you through to the end.
But if you have not,
death will always come too soon
and be too terrible to face."
Legacy – What We Leave Behind
Death is the great unknown, the final equalizer. No one truly knows what lies beyond, though faith and philosophy offer their theories—karma, reincarnation, heaven and hell, enlightenment, the return to source, the deep sleep, even the rainbow bridge.
Are we a single drop of water falling from the sky, only to merge with the river and return to the expanse of the sea? Whether you turn to science or faith, the afterlife remains a mystery. The only certainty is the impact we make here and now, our role in the never-ending cycle of birth, death, and rebirth.
I was never afraid of death until I knew what it was to truly live. Andy Dufresne in The Shawshank Redemption put it simply: “Get busy living or get busy dying.”
Now, cresting into my mid-40s, I find myself more deliberate, more intentional, more reflective with my time—working toward impact, purpose, and meaning.
I’m at peace with the things I’ve accomplished, the lives I’ve touched, and the people I’ve helped—including myself. But what brings me the deepest fulfillment isn’t any single achievement—it’s the loving space I’ve co-created with my wife; the container we’ve built to hold each other and our kids. The other day, I found myself running mindless errands, an ear-to-ear grin spreading across my face as I thought about the love in my heart. How effortlessly and freely it flows, how easy it is to give and receive when we allow it.
What Will You Do With Your One Wild and Precious Life?
"The Summer Day" by Mary Oliver
Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean —
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down —
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? If you don’t yet know, if you feel stuck in what comes next—we are here to help.