24 Hours 🕑

    If you had 24 hours to live, what would you do?

    Pretty simple question, really. Who hasn’t been asked this at least once in their lifetime? Simple question, yet complicated answer. 24 hours can really fly by in the blink of an eye. Regardless, the question remains- what would you do? Would you party into oblivion, doing all the drugs and alcohol you could get your hands on before the dreaded final hour arrives? Would you go out with a bang, intoxicated and abbreviated beyond recognition? Or would you take risks like never before- go sky-diving, climb mountains, swim with sharks? Would you go to the casino, and bet it all on red? Or would you hit the race track, and spend your final hours betting on horses to get your thrills? Or would you self-implode to the knowledge that you were going to die in 24 hours, and take your own life instead? Would you spend time with your family and loved ones? Would you throw a party or BBQ and simply enjoy your remaining hours with the people you hold dear?

    There is no clear answer. There is no right or wrong response. In reality, we all have our own choices to make, according to our mentality. I suppose that is the purpose of the exercise in the first place. Mentality. It really shapes the reality we live in. Death has a certain way of bringing out our fight or flight response, something we all have buried deep down inside. We all are given a choice, when facing dark forces, how we wish to respond. Some people simply run away, doing everything in their power to escape the inevitable. They run, travelling far and wide, all over the globe, in search of something they’ll never find. Others, they run from themselves- doing any sort of practice to avoid the silence and hearing their own thoughts. Running has become one of humanity’s favourite pastimes as of late. How many people do you know, who work their tails off, just to escape somewhere else for a week or two? They put their heads down, grind away at something they do not like, telling themselves it’ll all be worth it, for the two weeks they can run away and completely escape. Every single day of their lives, working away like robots, with their mind looking ahead to something down the line. Sounds like a pretty good way to live, if you want to miss out on everything right in front of you. I never truly understood that mentality, to be honest. I suppose it just isn’t in me, to lock away my soul and slave away on a charade. Spending 95% of your life, wishing you were somewhere else, seems like a pretty poor way to live. Yet millions, if not billions of people, do it. They shut off completely, ignoring their own spirit and needs, in order to chase a feeling they never truly get to hold. Travelling from one place to the next, adding stamps to their passport. Filling in the map with their footprints, as if there was something to achieve at the end of it all.

    Don’t get me wrong, I love discovering new places. New cultures, new cities, new climates. All of it can be extremely enriching and help develop an individual to truly understand the complexity of the world. With so much history, so much knowledge, available all around the globe, why wouldn’t you soak it all in? I sit here on my laptop, wishing to learn as much history about our culture and civilization as humanly possible. I wish to visit Italy, Turkey, Greece, Croatia, Egypt, Lebanon, Iran. I even wish to venture far out to the East, and see Thailand, Japan, Singapore, Hong Kong, China for myself. So much history, so much culture- all which I am deprived of, living here in the West. I wish to travel to museums, ancient locations, national landmarks. I want to see the Pyramids of Giza, the Great wall of China, Mount Fuji, Gobekli Tepe. I want to experience and absorb as much of our amazing planet and accomplishments as the human race as humanly possible. We live on such a beautiful planet, for such a short time. Truly, the lifespan of humans is nothing more than a blink of the eye. One day we’re here, the next we’re gone. Like dust in the wind. I want to observe and learn about our greatest accomplishments, the things we have done in such a short amount of time. Let’s be real, it has been an incredibly short amount of time. In the grand scheme of things, humans have been here for less than a heartbeat. We rise, we live, and then we fall. All within the cycle. Short, yet beautiful. The idea of not truly appreciating it all seems like such a poor mentality to me. 

    24 hours doesn’t seem like a long time to have left. In fact, if you break it down to minutes, it’s only 1,440 minutes. How many days of 24 hours have you spent, putting your head in the sand, wishing you were some place else? How many 24 hours have you spent, grinding away at something you hate, simply because you believe of a rainbow at the end of the road? Most of society does it, every single day. Monday to Friday, digging away at a job we hate, doing something we don’t love, working with people we do not like. Yet we push thru it, regardless. We fight thru it, denying the very cries from our soul, in order to achieve- what? Achieve a weekend, where we can go out and get drunk and high Friday thru Sunday? Enjoy a weekend where we can sit on the couch, completely exhausted, and watch TV? Make it all the way to the weekend, just to sit around, drink beer and watch sports? See, just like the traveler, who grinds away, wishing to be somewhere else. Always trying to escape. Always out of sync and out of balance, between who they are and what they do. Sacrificing their own soul for what? A pay check? A literal piece of paper? How many 24 hours have you wasted in your lifetime, chasing dollars, only to spend it trying to escape? The great rat race, where humans voluntarily sign up to run circles over and over again. We spend all our time chasing an illusion, trying to find something that is already within. It’s a never-ending cycle, vicious and evil in nature. We lock away our hearts and souls, just to spend eternity trying to re-find them. And then we lie to ourselves, saying that we lived.

    How would I spend my final 24 hours, if I knew I was going to die? I suppose that is the question. For me, personally, I think it’s quite simple. I would sit still for 24 hours, and meditate my way into oblivion. If Death is the unstoppable force, then I would become the immovable object. If Death were guaranteed to come for me in 24 hours, then I would meet it as an old friend. I suppose that would be my way of fighting the system. I suppose that the ability to sit still and smile, even in the face of Death, would be my act of defiance against the inevitable truth. The inevitable truth, that the unstoppable force will always come out swinging. Yet despite that, I would not give it power. I would not allow it to change who I am. I would not allow the knowledge of 24 hours to cause me to react any which way I do not see fit. I would spend my last 24 hours, however I so wish. I would choose peace over chaos. I would choose myself over Death.

                    Amen.