Live A Worthy Life
Death is the ultimate transformative experience.
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Lessons from Anand Vaidya
Anand Vaidya was a professor of philosophy. In ‘Terminal illness and Transformative Experience’ he reflects on his late-stage stomach cancer and the implications of living with the knowledge of impending death.
Vaidya passed away recently.
There is now no escaping the question: what matters most to me? What should I do? I cannot shake off deciding on these questions with the thought “I can always figure this out later”. Time is not on my side.
Choosing how to spend one’s remaining time is not all that different from choosing how to spend one’s time. The moral questions are omnipresent.
Death is the ultimate transformative experience.
When a person transforms epistemically, they gain knowledge of “what the experience is like” that they could not have had without the experience.
What suffering is worth undergoing? And when we ask the question what is a life worth living, we need to transcend the individual.
The temporal dimension of terminal illness is salient and it matters. How much time one has matters for what they can accomplish. There is an urgency that is neither diminished by working faster nor more often. Because the urgency concerns finality, without further qualification.
The knowledge of this terminality, given that it concerns final existence, is deeply transformative.
Till next week,
Peace!
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Memento Mori