The Cost of Being Mortal
Worth the Cost of Being Mortal
There’s a question I keep circling, not in a morbid way, but in a genuinely curious one: when we save a life, what are we saving it for?
Not just from what. For what.
Maybe surviving something early makes the end-of-life questions arrive ahead of schedule. What would you do differently? What matters? What are you becoming in the pursuit of your goals? What kind of life would feel, at the end, not perfect, not painless, not optimized, but worth it?
I imagine myself very old sometimes, sitting beneath a tree on a hill, looking down toward water. Maybe there’s a swing. Maybe there’s just the quiet satisfaction of having stayed curious long enough to see the plot keep twisting. And in that imagined future, I ask myself: Was this a life worth dying for?
And the answer I want is yes.
Not because I fixed everything. Not because I became impressive in all the approved ways. Not because I never wasted time, never got lost, never followed the wrong thread, never sat in the hammock while the laundry waited in its little domestic courtroom.
Yes because I noticed.
Yes because I made things.
Yes because I stayed human when the systems got strange.
Yes because I kept asking better questions.
Yes because I learned that designing the board sometimes matters more than winning the game I was handed.
There are people we pass on the path who seem to be wasting away, and the mind wants to know what happened. What narrowed their options? What made the next square on the board disappear? What combination of circumstance, biology, loneliness, pain, habit, and weather turned a life into this?
But maybe the same question comes back around to me too. What am I doing with my own options? Which ones have I mistaken for unavailable? Which ones have I been waiting for someone else to permit?
Maybe a life worth dying for is not grand every day. Maybe it is built out of small acts of response: noticing the person in the road, taking the detour when something feels wrong, petting the friendly dog, writing the song, asking the question, choosing the next square, patching the leak, remembering that optimism is not the opposite of sinking.
The opposite of sinking might be response.
And maybe the goal is not to become invincible, or endlessly useful, or morally available to every open wound.
Maybe the goal is to become someone who can look back, beneath that tree, with the water below, and say:
I did not merely survive.
I spent the life.
I made something with the time.
This was worth the cost of being mortal.