About Time

I watched the movie About Time last night. If you haven’t seen it — you should — but it is about a 20 something who learns that he can travel back in time and relive moments of his own life. He can go back and change things that went wrong, that he didn’t like, or he can just choose to relive the moments of his life.

The movie covers about ten years of his life. Moving out of his family home, finding love, starting a family, and experiencing death of a loved one.

I originally came across the movie by fluke. Amanda and I were on a bus in Peru. Traveling from the desert oasis of Huacachina to Lima, the capital. This movie just happened to be playing. I fell in love with the message. Towards the end, I was sitting there on the bus crying. Touched by the father and son relationship. Feeling grateful to be alive.

There are some plot holes. Some questions that come up about the mechanics of the time travel. But, there is also a great message you can take from the movie. The message told through this story is to savor life. To be aware of the magic of living and to enjoy it, instead of getting wrapped up in the stressors that don’t actually matter when you consider the fact that you are going to die.

It shows death, not as something to fear, but as an excellent way to remember to experience life. 

Why don’t we think about death more often?

Thinking about dying can be uncomfortable. For a lot of people who were raised Christian, there is this moment of judgment that you apparently have coming when you die. It seems natural to avoid thinking about it. It seems natural to procrastinate thinking about death like you procrastinate thinking about an exam you have to take in university.

Death is still uncomfortable to think about even if you don’t think you are going to be judged when you die.

It could be instinctual. That as a human being, the thought of death evokes a fear response.

Or what if it is fear of regret. Fear that in the moments before we die, we will look back at all the things we did with our lives and think “well, that was pretty dumb.”

There is nothing to fear about dying.

No one can know for sure what will happen after you die. All the people who are alive haven’t experienced death. Death is irreversible. None of us know what it is like to be dead because we are all alive. None of us have experience with death, but we do have experience with not being alive.

We all have not been alive before in the period before we were born.

Do you remember what it was like before you were born?

A tiny group of people might claim that they remember moments from a past life, but for virtually all of us, the experience of not being alive was nothing. We don’t remember anything because we didn’t exist.

Just like you didn’t exist to experience anything before you were born. You won’t exist to experience anything after you die. There is nothing you should fear about death because you won’t be around to experience anything.

We don’t think about death because it makes us question our lives.

When you have lived a life that other people wanted you to live, you have this fear of dying. This fear of looking back on your life and thinking “I really fucked that up.”

The thing we fear is paying attention to this thing that we have been ignoring. It’s like the push to avoid thinking about that chore that you continually avoid doing.

You’ve been living your life, thinking that you are building towards something, without realizing that all the while you’ve been on a treadmill heading towards a cliff. Your title, your money, your power, your fame, your possessions will all be worthless to you when you die. It is awkward to think about death after spending so much of your life rushing around accumulating things and ignoring that you are not going to exist in the future.

You won’t being watching the world from some other dimension, looking around as people name buildings after you, or talk about you, or write about you in books. Having people remember you after you die won’t matter to you once you are dead.

The fear of death comes from knowing this but ignoring it. We are afraid when we remember that all the sacrifices we are making, doing things that we don’t what to do, won’t actually matter in the long-term. That’s why we feel afraid.

Once you realize that everything is coming to an end, you can stop living in fear. You can start making decisions that make a lot more sense because you realize in the future you won’t exist.

You will make fewer sacrifices for the distant future, and start living more for now. You will start to focus on savoring life, and realize that you begin to live a life free of fear.

I love movies about death because they remind me to live. They remind me that there really is nothing to fear in life. Because the worst thing that can happen to you really isn’t that bad. All the ridiculous fear that I experience in my day to day life is put back in perspective. I realize that fear about what my boss thinks of me is pointless. Same with fear about not making lots of money, or fear of upsetting the people around me. All of this fear seems a lot less significant.

Death becomes the foundation that I build my life on top of. It reminds me to savor today because it will soon be over and it will never come back. It reminds me to chase my dreams because that will make my life more interesting. It reminds me not to take anything too seriously because everything has some degree of pointlessness.