Life is about balance: work and play, arguments and lovemaking, taking in and giving back, the expansion of travel and the concentration of being at home. I try to live my life in such a way that these two poles are always in balance. As a consequence, I don’t believe that I would feel a strong need to do something I hadn’t done before, or visit a place that I had always wanted to see but hadn’t gotten to yet.
Reaching the end of one’s life causes one to reflect on just how well that balance has been maintained. To what end would this reflection be; whom would it serve? Of course, ideas and reflections can be shared via written word or spoken word. But even more significantly, to be able to walk gently but determinedly toward this mortal life’s exit, with a sense of completion (even if the realization is that the balance was rarely perfect) feels right to me. The self is a complete whole, made even more complete through relationships with the Divine and with others, but a complete whole nonetheless. Self-reflection is one of the greatest gifts we ever give ourselves.
But there are two things which never fall on the scale of balance because there can never be enough of them: beauty and love. As the shackles fall away from us and we look at the possibility of death with the eye of compassion (for ourselves) and acceptance (for death, itself), we discover that accumulated professional success has no merit, that the busy-ness of our lives only makes sense to the degree that it helped us become whom we needed to experience ourselves as, that resentments are not even considered, and that there is no such thing as unfinished business. All of these fall off of us like shackles. We are left as shining beacons of inner light. This is no candle-power version of light; it is with the wattage of a searchlight.
What has created this brightness? Beauty and Love.
I have spent my life in the pursuit, the appreciation, and the creation/outpouring of these. It is impossible to have enough. Music, my life’s work, is about both. Nature is about beauty. Meditation is about love. Relationships are about love, and the best ones are also about beauty. To look our beloved in the eye, and bask in the warmth of love, is one of the most precious gifts we can offer each other.
So, the last week of my life would be a week of reflection, of conversations with those who are most dear to me, of walks among the ancient redwood trees and along the eternal sea, of re-reading beloved poems, of reviewing my decades of photography, of cooking meals, of concerts attended and a solo concert which I would perform. I want my parting breath to be one of giving, of sharing beauty, of spreading love.