On Death’s Doorstep

We see that everything that takes birth one day dies after a certain period. Despite this, very few of us ever seriously reflect on our own death. Such is our heedlessness! The fact is that any moment can be our last moment on Earth. We could, quite literally, be standing at death’s doorstep at this very moment!

Death is a journey from a known world towards an unknown world. While in this world, we undertake journeys—sometimes short journeys, sometimes long journeys. We go from one known place to another. But the journey of death is different. It is to travel from out of this known world into a world that is completely unknown to us.

We are so used to the journeys we take every day—for instance, from our home to our workplace—that we don’t think much about them. That is understandable. But we tend to exhibit the same sort of taking-for-granted attitude towards the journey of death, which is a journey of an utterly different kind. It is the most serious kind of journey, but yet we treat it totally callously, hardly ever thinking about it. While we make elaborate preparations for the journeys that we undertake here every day in this world, we make little or no preparations for our final journey, when, after death, we have to travel into the Hereafter.