Everyone is a Traveller Towards Death
According to a news report, the British reality TV star Jade Goody was diagnosed with cancer. The report went on to say that “she has started planning for her funeral”, adding that she wanted people to cry over her. “Most people plan their weddings. But I am planning my funeral”, Goody said.
Jade Goody was at the peak of her profession when, suddenly, in August 2008, she was told that she was suffering from cervical cancer. She then cancelled her professional plans for the future and decided to prepare for her death.
This same story is that of every other human being, too. People are busy celebrating this or that event, but they die before they can do all that, leaving this world forever and reaching the next one. Hence, what every person ought to do is to recognize that his pre-death phase of life is only a temporary journey and put all his attention on preparing for the never-ending post-death phase of life.
Wise is one who remembers this greatest reality—the reality of death.
We think we are living life, but the fact of the matter is that each one of us is actually standing on death’s doorstep. When we have no idea when death will overtake us, every moment of ours is a possible moment of death. Every step we take is a step that takes us towards death. Life for us is the experience of today. Today is life’s day. Tomorrow maybe death’s day.
Death is a journey from a known world to an unknown one. We travel every day—sometimes for a short distance, at other times over a long distance. Sometimes, we travel within a country. On occasion, we might travel to another country. All these journeys are travels from one known place to another. We are so familiar with such journeys that we do not take it as something serious at all.
But the journey of death is very different. This journey is a journey from a known world into an unknown one. Undoubtedly, this is something of utterly serious importance for each one of us. But because of our conditioning, we do not feel the seriousness of this issue. We are so used to the sort of travelling that we routinely do in this world that we are not able to grasp the gravity of the journey of death. Because of this, death seems very remote for us, not something that can happen at any moment.
Our thinking is shaped by our conditioning. This is the greatest cause for a person’s insensitivity. To realize the utter seriousness of death, we need to come out of our conditioning. We need to move beyond our familiar ways of thinking. Only then can we understand the reality of death, which is the most serious thing that is bound to happen with every single one of us, some day or the other.
