Find What You Love and Let It Kill You
Find What You Love and Let It Kill You
⏰ 剪存时间：2022-10-18 11:41:33 (UTC+8)
“We’re all going to die, all of us. What a circus! That alone should make us love each other, but it doesn’t. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities. We are eaten up by nothing.”
Yes, we’re all going to die. You and me and everyone else. One day, eventually, that fateful moment will come calling and take us all away.
When we die isn’t even really the interesting question, as once you’re dead you won’t be around to care about what you did or didn’t do.
No, the interesting question is how we die. Will it be cancer? Cardiac arrest? Anthrax attack? Choking on a pretzel?
Me? I’m holding out for parachute failure. Or maybe a plane crash. OK, not really, but sometimes when I’m on a plane , and we’re landing and there’s terrible weather, I start daydreaming about what a crash would be like—the oxygen masks falling, women shrieking, babies crying. Maybe I’d reach across the aisle and hold a total stranger’s hand in a final dramatic gesture as we wait for the inevitable together. The earth would sweep upon us and together we’d be slammed into eternity.
Luckily that hasn’t happened yet. But it’s exciting to think about.
When we think about our own deaths, we typically think about the final moments. The hospital beds. The crying family. The ambulances. We don’t think about the long string of choices and habits which lead to those final moments.
You could say that our death is a work-in-progress over the course of our lives —each breath, each bite, each swallow, each late night and missed traffic light, each laugh and scream and cry and crashing fist and lonely sigh—they each bring us one step closer to our own dramatic denouement from this world.
So the better question isn’t when you’re going to die. It’s what are you choosing as your vehicle to get there? If everything you do each day brings you closer to death in its own unique and subtle way, then what are you choosing to let kill you?
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The title of this article is a quote from the author and poet Charles Bukowski. This entire article kind of doubles as an ode to him.
Bukowski was a shameless drinker, womanizer, and all-around fuck up. He would get drunk on stage at his poetry readings and verbally abuse his audience. He gambled a lot of his money away and had an unfortunate habit of exposing himself in public.
But underneath Bukowski’s disgusting exterior was a deep and introspective man with more character than most. Bukowski spent most of his life broke, drunk, and getting fired from various jobs. Eventually, he ended up working in a post office filing letters. All his life he wrote fruitlessly, a total unknown and a loser. He wrote for almost 30 years before finally getting his first book deal. 1 It was a meager deal. When accepting it, he wrote, “I have one of two choices—stay in the post office and go crazy… or stay out here and play at writer and starve. I have decided to starve.”
In my opinion, the honesty in his writing—his fears, failures , regrets , self-destruction, emotional dysfunction —it is unparalleled. He will tell you the best and worst of himself without flinching, without shifting his eyes or even muttering a “sorry about that” as an afterthought. He wrote about both shame and pride without qualification. His writing was equanimous—a silent embrace of the horrible and beautiful man that he was.
And what Bukowski understood, which most people don’t, is that the best things in life can sometimes be ugly. Life is messy, and we’re all a little screwed up in our own special snowflake kind of way. He never understood the baby boomer obsession with peace and happiness or the idealism that came along with it. He understood that you don’t get one side without the other. You don’t get love without pain . You don’t get meaning and profundity without sacrifice.