“I know that everyone has to die, but I was hoping an exception could be made in my case!” - Leo Tolstoy
Imagine your office building was burning down and while everyone was running to escape, a colleague was sitting at his desk happily checking his emails, sipping a hot coffee and flicking through yesterday’s football news. You'd wonder whether that person was actually tuned into reality.
To think about death is actually a requirement to being considered sane. There are a few REAL problems in this world: situations that NOBODY wants, but situations that EVERYONE will experience: disease, old age, and ultimately death. People in Latin America would hang skulls in their houses to remind themselves. Yogis in India would meditate on the banks of the Ganges where open-pyre funerals were taking place. The Chinese coined the maxim "Life is like a game of chess... the king, the queen or the pawn - they all end up in the box at the end of the game".
A recent study showed that 72% of people who died last year never wrote a will. Maybe they never thought their time was coming, or maybe they just didn’t want to entertain the thought. Thinking about death... maybe we don't do it enough. If we did, it would certainly make us think a bit deeper about life.