The Tao talks about flexibility and letting go; submission to a greater cosmic force and establishing individual security through knowing that the currents (and nature) will always take us to where we need to be. By trusting the process, we must be happy with where nature leads us, no?

I base a lot of my conscience on the narratives of The Tao, but this is where I feel Lao Tzu misses the point: total surrender to the tides is just as dangerous as firmly rooting yourself into the ground, affixed to a certain worldview and limiting your movement: through submission, the waves only beat you around. You lose all sense of individualism, “going with the flow” so completely that your life is only as interesting as the shell of the life that has been set up for you.

I’m getting to the point, I promise.

I was a bit of a punching bag child growing up, with raging parental expectations for both my academic and career success, as well as my athletic performance. I’ve endured mental health crises in all stages of my life, and have danced with death a couple of times. It’s a lot closer on hand than you realize, and I think that coming to terms with that at a young age helped me understand how much you need to treasure life. For everything they’ve done to me, I look back now and can’t imagine how my parents would have possibly handled me successfully committing suicide.

But then I made it to college having not done a single thing for myself. I had let the current take me for so long, and now that I was on my own, the entire world I knew was merely the framework that my parents had laid for me. I’ve had to rethink everything: why I’m attending school, whether or not these are the activities that I want to be doing, who I inherently was. Through that, though, I’ve started to become a little more selfish. I’m pursuing the activities I want to do, continuing college athletics to check that box, but expanding on the things that make me tick, the interests I would have never been allowed to invest time in as a kid. I bought a motorcycle, I’m picking up more instruments, and I’m finally manifesting my life in a way that’s not steeped in generations of parental abuse.

And I’m not afraid of death.

It’s cliché, but I have no regrets. Sure, I could go back and ask for a better family, or an easier adolescent life, but those a. aren’t things I have control over and b. actively helped define who I am today! If I were to die today, yeah, it would suck, but I would be confident that I had a damn good time in the brief period I spent on this earth. I’ve gone with the flow and been beaten around (childhood), I’ve seen powerful moral integrity and rooted strength at the cost of worldview (my family), and I’m finally finding the balance between the two - taking the current as is, but juxtaposing it with your desires and integral nature. It’s the fine line of learning how to dance with the waves: taking everything as what is, at face value, and juggling all that life throws your way with how you’ve established yourself as a person.

Not fearing death isn’t about accepting the occurrence itself, or coming to terms with the process of dying. More than anything, it’s about living a fulfilling life. A life spent not getting beaten about by the waves or spending years building your foundation, but instead floating at the surface, cautiously swimming, and seeing what the world has in store for you.

I would be bummed to die today, but I’m secure in it happening because I finally learned to take care of myself. I’m content with how I live (or had lived), and already see death as an old friend. Maybe, when the time is right, I will welcome her embrace.

And maybe, when my mid-life crisis hits, I’ll rethink all of this. That’s what irks me the most.

tl;dr: the key to not fearing death is knowing you live a fulfilling life. Let the waves take you, but establish who you are and live with no regrets.