The most common answer my students give to the question, “What is something you would not want to know?” is “when I will die.” They usually say something like “it would make life less meaningful,” or “I’d be scared to find out.”
Not me.
I’d love for the all-knowing Being to tell me the exact moment of my demise. If it were sooner than I expect, then I could get busy really living before my time is done; if it were later, then I’d be able to take up base-jumping right away.
In reality, I think I have a pretty good idea, barring accident, of when I’ll die. Or, at least, I think I know when I’d like to.
For years, I always told people I expected to make it to 112. Now, having made it well past the halfway point to that number, I can think of nothing I’d less like to do.
Life, for all the joys and adventure it offers, is still essentially suffering, and things will only get worse with the worsening decay each additional year inevitably brings.
And even if meditation, yoga, and recalibrated aspirations lead to the elimination of all those desires which currently cause so much misery, no doubt there will be other sources of distress: health problems, loved ones dying, some newer, more compelling fad than the mobile phone, yet another Rolling Stones concert tour—you name it.
Spare me.
I’m thinking 25 more years will be plenty. I’ll be 87 then, which is almost two decades beyond the biblical allotment of three score and ten. Anything I hope to do I should be able to finish by then and anything I haven’t done, I probably didn’t really want to, anyway.
It would be nice to be reasonably healthy up to that point, but if I’m not, I’d be satisfied to end things sooner.
Just have that all-knowing Being send me my expiration date and I will plan accordingly.
