A Good Life To
How should you live if you are to die young?
A short life is a good life to obsess excessively over one thing. Or over everything. Whichever it is you choose, whether to be loyal to a single obsession or to be a prostitute as you currently are with your interests, you must remember to make it worth it.
A short life is a good life to find out what the worst that could happen is. Take the risk. Do the thing that you would doublethink. Do you remember how Aliyah said she doesn’t do stupid things? It is because she doesn’t plan to live a short life. A short life is a good life to make lots of stupid decisions.
A short life is a good life to love intensely. And if you cannot love, to search for it. Don’t love so intensely that you forget to be your own person. You have done that already, It is only nice at the moment, not as nice in retrospect. Although retrospect doesn’t matter in a short life. Love in a way that you might simply enjoy the look or knowledge of being. This love I speak of need not be romantic only. Find as many friends to love intensely, but also find a lover to share your ridiculously many quirks with.
A short life is a good life to lose sleep. To stay up late into the night and work on your passion. There is always something to be passionate about. You must in your short life be dedicated to investing yourself into working late into the night. With the type of short life obsession you should have, this should come easy to you.
A short life is a good life to be religiously conscious. In fact, if you will identify as a religious abider in this short life, it is important that you take the things ‘the religion you subscribe to’ expects from you seriously. Being a good Muslim will mean a lot for you. In all your endeavours to remain religiously conscious, don’t forget this next point.
A short life is a good life to be good to people. A short life is a good life to be nice to people. To be polite. To treat people who offer you service nicely. To smile at people you know and people you don’t know. To be the right amount of goofy.
A short life is a good life to be very patient, a good life to wait. Wait as if you have more life than you expect you do.
In a life where you want to be able to do a lot of things and achieve a lot in all the things you are doing, the question of how do you do all these things should come up. The frequency of your achievements should perplex people. You achieve this by using your time effectively. And making more time available to be used. This is how a short life should be used. Wisely.
A short life is a good life to notice things. It is a good life to look and to see. It was at the end of the movie, About time, that I first realised that the mundaneness of life is something to be enjoyed. That somehow, the uncertainty of the day can make the day worthwhile. A short life is a good life to know that you do not know.
A short life is a good life for stories. To read and to tell many of them. You can always find hope in a story, even the hopeless ones where everyone dies or worse still, where they want to.
A short life is a good life to have so much more to live for.
It is a good life to -
Authors’ Note
I was combing through my old essays and found this essay I wrote to myself in 2019. ‘Dying young’ is a fear I have had since I was self-aware enough to think about my own mortality (so maybe when I was 10.) At some point in time, growing up, I deviated from the default ‘i hope I die old’ to ‘what if I die young.’ This thought has stuck with me ever since and it’s one I muse over a lot. I continuously try to adjust my life philosophy to prepare myself for early death. I still believe a short life is a good life for many of the things above but more importantly, these days, I am just trying to make my short life a good life to be remembered for.
