But also, like most, you tend not to value your life unless you are faced with the inevitable opportunity to take it from you.

The death (and disease) are unavoidable aspects of life. It sometimes seems, though, that we’ve developed a delusional denial of this. We pour billions into prolonging life with increasingly expensive medical and surgical interventions, most of them employed in our final, decrepit years. From a big-picture perspective, this seems a futile waste of our precious health-dollars.

Most Eastern philosophical traditions appreciate the importance of death-awareness for a well-lived life. The Tibetans spend a lot of time living with death, if that isn’t an oxymoron.

An awareness of our mortality, of our precious finitude, can, paradoxically, move us to seek – and, if necessary, create – the meaning that we so desperately crave.