Although we amplify our cognitive degree of awareness and enhance our appreciation for life experiences by maturing, it also brings us death. Facing a certain death forces a person to examine the worthiness of continuing to live.

A principled life begins by accepting the evident truth that we must die. Death becomes us. Knowledge of the impermanence of our existence reassures us that how we live does make a difference. Because our allotted time for living is finite, we must make the most of each day.

Human mortality threatens a person’s ontic self-affirmation. Life is a dream within a dream. The past is nothing, the future is an illusion, and my own existence is a trifle. If I can stop living a life of artifice and face my own nonbeing with courage, I will no longer suffer from the demons of damnation.

People cannot escape the looming specter of a deathwatch and the imposing emptiness that comes with the termination of their existence. People resist going silently into the night. We seek to howl at the moon and make known our search for a diagrammatic overture that voices our unquantifiable existence.

Time is quixotic because it can torment us. When we have insufficient stimulus to fill our lives, we resent the relentless quality of time, and we engage in activities designed to “kill time.” Time that passes slowly creates insufferable boredom; time that passes to quickly makes us aware of our accelerated death march. A person’s perspective on time depends mostly on what they are most afraid of, boredom or death.

There are innumerable unanswerable questions that plague humankind. It is permissible to accept the unknown and unknowable as establishing the outer limits of human possibilities. Unanswerable questions – questions with no provable correct answers – describe the boundaries of human existence. All we know for sure is that everything that is alive will die.

Nature is never static. It is always changing. Everything is in a constant state of flux. Nothing endures. Everything is in the process of either coming into being or expiring.

The universe is eternal; every person appears in the stream of time, and then disappears. The ego does not survive. Life is significant despite that it ends. The products of human life that we cherish – love, happiness, beauty, art, kindness, – have value without being everlasting. We must conquer human fearfulness in order to live a dignified life.

The aim of all life is death. Life is the apprenticeship that we serve preparing for death. Life is the fleeting spark of divinity that precedes a deathless eternity.