Most people fear death, but I believe one of the universal realizations of the truly spiritual is that death is a reason to shed fear, not suffer from it. In a famous speech at Stanford, Steve Jobs, who has pancreatic cancer, cautioned the students listening not to waste their lives in fear:

“Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything – all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose.”

These are my feelings. We live in a fearful country. We are told we are lucky to have miserable jobs in places we don’t want to be so that we can have all of the things we are increasingly afraid of not having – expensive health care, retirement funds, mortgages, all kinds of technology, from computers to cell phones to big screen TV’s.  If we don’t go along, see what we have to lose.

I don’t want to be able to afford their version of security, their tests, pills, joint replacements and long life in the twilight state of dependency and impairment. Perhaps if I can’t afford it, I will have no choice but to live well, age well and die well. Thoreau’s ghost will be right there with me.

But Jobs is right. Losing these things is nothing when confronted with death. Or a wasted life, just another kind of death.

I do not fear death nearly so much as I fear living poorly, or, for that matter, dying poorly in the way our health care and social system would have me die.

Jobs was talking about perspective, and when we are bombarded all day by the self-interested rantings, alarms and predictions of politicians, business people, so-called health care practioners, pharmaceutical companies, and fear-peddling journalists and forecasters, it is easy to lose perspective and sink into a life whose choices are bounded by fear. Steve Jobs was as good as his word about not living that way. I’m in.