Death is an ending, but living is a constant beginning—and beginnings terrify me more than endings because endings require no choices while living demands them constantly. Death is passive; life is relentlessly active. Death is certain; life is perpetually uncertain. Death has a script; life is improvisation.
I have spent more energy avoiding life than I have avoiding death. I’ve dodged opportunities more skillfully than I’ve dodged dangers, evaded possibilities more carefully than I’ve evaded threats, built walls against hope more effectively than I’ve built defenses against harm.
Living fully requires courage that dying doesn’t demand. Dying asks nothing of you—it happens to you rather than through you. But living asks everything: that you choose, risk, fail, recover, choose again. That you remain vulnerable to disappointment, open to pain, available to loss. That you show up for an experience you cannot control with an outcome you cannot predict.
We’re more afraid of living because living can hurt us repeatedly while dying can only hurt us once. Living offers endless opportunities for rejection, failure, humiliation, heartbreak. Living means being wrong, looking foolish, trying things you’re not good at, loving people who might not love you back.
Death, by contrast, is simple. It requires no skill, no practice, no courage. It demands no decisions about who to become, what to risk, how to love. Death is the ultimate escape from the terrifying responsibility of being alive.
But maybe the fear of living is really the fear of living fully—the fear of inhabiting our complete selves rather than hiding in the safe, small versions we’ve constructed to avoid disappointment. Maybe we’re not afraid of life itself but of the bigness life demands, the authenticity it requires, the vulnerability it insists upon.
Living fully means accepting that pain and joy are packaged together, that growth requires discomfort, that love demands the risk of loss. It means choosing aliveness even when aliveness feels dangerous, uncertain, overwhelming.
Tonight I want to practice being more afraid of not living than of dying, more terrified of staying small than of being hurt, more concerned with the life I’m not living than with the death I cannot avoid.