The Road Less Travelled and Beyond by M. Scott Peck

Author:M. Scott Peck
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781448116171
Publisher: Ebury Publishing

THE CHOICE TO DIE GRACEFULLY

The final choice of our lives on this earth is whether or not we go out in style. For it’s not a matter of whether to die but how. We have a lifetime to prepare. Unfortunately, the denial of aging in our culture goes hand-in-glove with the denial of death. For many, this denial circumvents the greatest learning of old age: how to accept limits. Our culture suggests that there are no limits—and furthermore, seems to suggest that there shouldn’t be any. Of course, real life challenges this notion on every level. Yet no-limits thinking is at the heart of much of television advertising. One ad that particularly annoyed me showed a woman in her sixties (who, of course, looked fortyish) playing tennis. The message was that because of some medicine she took, her arthritis didn’t keep her off the courts. The ad concluded with an invisible voice from the sidelines joyously exclaiming: “Live without limits!”

The reality is that we must live with limitations, even from the time we are young, quite exploratory, and generally vibrant. As we age, we face far greater limitations. We have by then made some choices—such as whether to be single or married, to work or to retire—that exclude other options. If someone becomes confined to a wheelchair, it would be foolish for him to believe that he can just hop on an airplane easily and go about business as usual.

It would be unnatural to welcome aging. A modicum of depression9 related to the losses inherent in growing old—or facing any change, for that matter—is natural. But just because it would be unnatural to invite aging does not mean we should deny the realities of aging and its painful process of stripping away. Aging eventually involves the stripping away of everything, including agility, sexual potency, physical beauty, and political power. Our options and choices become ever more limited and we are challenged to learn to live with these limitations.

Dying, of course, is the final stripping away. I’ve heard many people say that “if” they have got to go—as if they really had a choice—they would rather die suddenly. The reason that cancer and AIDS are so dreaded is that with such diseases one dies slowly. The gradual deterioration involves experiencing a total loss of control, and for most people this process is equated with a loss of dignity. The sense of indignity involved in stripping away is very real. But a distinction can be made between false dignity and true dignity, and there is a tremendous difference between the responses of the ego and those of the soul to the process of dying. Our egos often can’t bear the loss of dignity from watching our bodies waste away. That’s because dignity has everything to do with the ego and nothing to do with the soul. In confronting the choice to give up control, the ego vigorously rebels despite an inevitable losing battle. The soul, on the other hand, welcomes the stripping-away process.

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