Poison excuses

# Chapter 68

What if you had less than five years left? To live? What would change? Its almost been five years since my mom passed away, and last night my first cousin who was at my mom’s funeral, passed away. I think Jerry was a year younger than me, maybe two. But what would have changed had he known five years ago that unless he massively changed the way he was living, that he had 4 years and 11 months more to go . . .

I think that he would have change absolutely nothing. We change nothing and we know that we are going to die too. Not the precise 4 years and 11 months kind of knowing, but the certainty that death is stalking us is sure, and yet we change nothing or very little. And the little we may change is aimed most often at thwarting an immediate and pressing discomfort, not delaying death or extending life.

Now I may be completely wrong here, but I don’t think that I am, yet knowing the date of our death may have real results and see us actually changing the way we eat and move and sleep and work and live. What do you think? My brother always insisted that he could quit drinking anytime that he wanted to, but he would also confess that if he couldn’t drink beer 24/7 then he didn’t want to live anyways. That is the kind of circular reasoning that makes me fairly certain that having a death date beforehand would not actually result in any large gains in our healthy living cycles. We make endless excuses for the poisons that we are killing ourselves with every day and that is the real truth of the matter.