I am not afraid.

In generations gone by society centred around the concept of 'the greater good'. As a species we valiantly accepted that sometimes hard things must be done at the expense of some in order to protect the greatest number of others, or in some cases to protect those with the greatest amount of life left to lead. It was a lore that grew from the paternalistic notions of protecting the women so they may in turn, maternalistically, protect the children. It was arguably our most profound primordial instinct. An instinct that saw hundreds of men go down with the Titanic, thousands die on battle fields and millions give of themselves and of their lives, to better their young, willingly, for millennia. To do something for the greater good is beyond the preservation of our species. It has always been about the children of tomorrow and the idea that we are bigger than ourselves and that our legacy is to pass on to our children (and theirs') the hard fought, bloodily won, freedoms and liberties we have been lucky enough to experience for the time that life has been ours. Perhaps one of our greatest unravellings of humanity has been to do away with that notion and to instead pursue one that forgoes the protection of the future of those who are not yet born, exchanging it for the selfish wanton desires of adults, in their plight to live at the expense of all others. Perhaps the notion that the protection of adults in the now is more important than the children of tomorrow is the cause of the degradation in our ability to be compassionate, humble and rational in our decision and sacrifice making abilities. That very selfishness, growing wildly, has been fervently fed by a rapid increase in life expectancy and, therefore, a decrease in our exposure to mortality.

Death. It is, after all, still a thing.

We die. All of us.

One day our number is up and it's our turn. Not a single one of us gets to live forever. Though now, on average, we live the longest lives in human history and as such we encounter death far less often than the generations immediately preceding us. Our grandparents are now living to an average of 83, when they were born the average life expectancy was only 65. Improvements in health care, safety measures, the advent of power, running water, sanitation and all the other advancements of our incredible civilisation have seen less young people dying than ever before. As such we now have a death deficit being paid by our society in the form of our psychological inability to accept and live alongside the concept of our own mortality. I consider myself fortunate to have known people who have spent years fighting death because they weren't finished, their work was not done and in that time, before their surrender, they created magic. Their fearless, formidable, in-your-face-death, approach to living was earthshaking because ‘the wings of a butterfly can start a hurricane’. I have lost others who died suddenly, without reason or warning. People who had lived wildly, hard and fast. I have known the perfection of a long life that slipped into a timely and peaceful death when they were ready and willing for it. I have been granted both the grief, that teaches you more about the human experience than any other emotion and the inexplicable peace that comes from knowing that at least the lost did something. There is an odd sense of achievement that comes with the all encompassing sadness, when you recognise that the life lost, was a life well lived. A life that meant something, changed something, created something. And I have learnt to see the beauty of the legacy left by all of them. The drive left in those who loved them to live well and to do what they were not able to complete, to honour them, remember them always and to live in accordance to that legacy. All those experiences have lead me to form quite a pragmatic and simplistic relationship with the idea of my own death. I have lived well, completely, with all that I am. I have loved and been loved and I have given my all, at every opportunity. I have taken risks and been rewarded with good fortune and I like to think I have created a legacy that will linger on in my absence. I do not cower away from the idea of a world without me, or, perhaps more selfishly, me without the world. I have dived headlong into the thought of it, grappled with it and found a place to put it all. I am not afraid. I have also been overcome by the maternal instincts that would have seen me fight to the death, without hesitation, for my own children, something worth dying for a thousand times over and the core reason that I am not afraid. But this journey of thought leads me to be confused and confronted by people who are so very afraid of death that they would clamber the lifeboats at the cost of all others, including their own, to survive even just a second longer. People who hardly live at all, as they get by in terror of what may be their demise or that of their loved ones. I feel this is a contributing factor to what we are currently seeing in our world gone mad. We used to say ‘youth is wasted on the young’, perhaps now the saying is more akin to ‘life is wasted on the living’. We went from creatures who instinctively felt that the peace and prosperity of our young was worth sacrificing, even dying for. To now… a people who are so very afraid of death that instead of living they would sooner stay frozen in place for all their time shielding themselves, their children and grandchildren from a genuine existence. And what would be the point of that? What is the point of life without a deep, wide, profound, encompassing, growing, expansive, living experience? Do we, in all honesty, have any right to rob anyone else of that opportunity to save ourselves a potential extra moment?

In my own mind, when I imagine being 90 years old I am overcome by what a joy but also what weight I would carry. Being old is by design a double edged sword, to be old you must lose and with that comes immeasurable suffering and inherent loneliness. It is the pinnacle of life, yet at the same time a precarious precipice.

I once heard an amazing lady of 92 discuss her late life as becoming like 'an ornament on a shelf'. She had lost her great love, several of her children, a grandchild, and here she existed in a nursing home "just waiting, with her sadness for company". These conversations are ones that helped me to overcome my fear of death and replace it with a love of living. There is so much more to existence than survival and we have a duty to embrace life without being crippled by terror, if for nothing else but the legacy of all those who did not get to live this long.

I have always said if I got to choose I would love to be an old lady one day, but I am never going to hedge my bets on that, I am going to live furiously because I am alive and I have no excuse not too. I am not afraid. Over time and loss, I have also come to understand that fear makes us irrational and often it makes us self-righteous. Currently there are people who are so very fearful that they are not only paralysed themselves, but they are decreeing with might that every other person in their family, neighbourhood, town and country should share in the virulence of their terror and also cower away from the world. They cling to an illegitimate hope that a pathogen will note down their fear and rid itself from the world.

If they were this fearful, of any other thing on earth and behaved in this same manner, we would call it a phobia and suggest they seek psychiatric assistance. Yet instead they are being spurred on by media, government and others amongst us at every given minute of the news cycle. Their fear is being accepted, validated, fed and watered in every utterance of the word 'safe' by politicians who are, in no uncertain terms, exploiting the scared for their own gains. They are being affirmed in their phobia by those who do not implore them to assess the genuine data and their own risk factors in a realistic and sensible manner to gather whether their fear is justifiable. Yet they are also the core reason for the irrational and unrealistic governmental policy that robs the fearless of the opportunity to live with their own autonomy.

Perhaps now is a good time for all of us to dwell on what we feel about our own death, beyond fear, and ponder what our legacy would look like. What our life would have amounted too if it were to expire tomorrow. Perhaps now is the time to dwell on what we are prepared to lay down to protect the future of our children. Perhaps now is the time to honestly look around and assess what fear is rational, what fear is not and decide which ones are our own and which ones we are holding for other people. We have to decide if we are prepared to start meeting the afraid with voices of fearlessness because we can not carry the fear of others if we are ever to be free again. Perhaps now is a Winston Churchillesque moment for us to look deep within and decide if we are prepared to squander what little time we may have, in fear, or if perhaps we are courageous enough to go on living life in a manner that demonstrates to our children that fear is not something to be entered into, or consumed by, lightly.