The Question You Should Start Asking Yourself

How to Cut Out All The Bulls**t

Welcome to the Brain and Body Warrior. A blueprint of lived lesson to help you understand your brain, conquer your body and develop your warrior mindset.

On today’s menu: The question I started asking myself (and you should too).

The Warrior

“It is not death that a man should fear, but he should fear never beginning to live.” - Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“He skipped down the hallway…”

These are words that I haven’t been able to get out of my head for the past few weeks.

Nor can I forget the question that they have raised.

Last month, after learning that his cancer, a rare acute lymphoblastic leukaemia, had returned, Robert Walls, a legend of Australian football in his 70’s, decided to voluntarily end his own life rather than face another gruelling bout of chemotherapy.

It wasn’t his death that shook me so much. I didn’t know him. It was how it had unfolded.

Supposedly, the day it happened, he was in “very good spirits.” “I can’t complain” were the words attributed to him as he neared the end.

His son even went onto describe how “he skipped down the hallway” on the way to his death, completely at ease and at peace.

This gave me serious pause.

He had “skipped”, almost happily it sounded like, to his own death.

It gave me pause because, personally, I couldn’t possibly imagine approaching my own demise in this way.

Death is something that has truly frightened me for as long as I can remember.

I remember counting the days I had managed to stay alive when I was ten years old. I’ve been brought to tears, on more than one occasion, just considering my own mortality. I can’t even watch the news because of all the death it reports.

How anyone could skip happily to the end of their life was quite beyond me (but maybe that says something about me. I’m not sure).

Any rate, as I read the news, and the initial wave of extensional dread passed over me, my brain suddenly asked me a burning question:

What would it take for me to “skip” happily to my death?

Ask yourself that question. Earnestly.

Take a moment to sit with the enormity of it.

It’s a moment we will all reach at some time, some sooner than others, some when they don’t deserve it. That’s the nature of existence.

What would it really take? How would you have to have lived your life for you to happily embrace the end of your existence?

I think, oddly enough, that’s ultimately what we all want. To get to the end of our days and simply say “I’m happy and I’m ready to go.” (or as Robert Walls so poetically put it “I can’t complain.”)

In a strange way, death provides the ultimate perspective on life. The idea of impermanence somehow cuts through all the bulls**t that can accumulate in our lives.

That’s hardly a new idea. But it’s one that most people take don’t take real advantage of. Because it’s uncomfortable, obviously. Because it’s something we’d rather just not think about.

For most, it actually takes a near death experience for them to really consider the idea, to really sit with it and incorporate it into the way that they approach life.

But, asking questions like the one above is perhaps the next best place to start (and, as an added bonus, it doesn’t require you to almost die).

Sadly, I can’t say, as of yet, that I have a real answer to the question. And something about that really stings. Why exactly, I can’t quite say.

But I think it’s a question that I will continue to ask myself, as I think you should to, because I know instinctively that there’s true hidden value in it somewhere.

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