Why do we struggle to believe that we will die one day?
aeon.co
aeon.co
What took me a good while to "realise", in the "existential shock" sense that the author describes, was the nature of life _before_ death; the process of maturation.
That you won't always be a sparkly eyed young man or woman. Your first love will be forever unique. Your school years happen once. You are only ever eighteen for one year. If indeed you have children, that will be a phase of your life, and then you'll be a mother or father. And so on and so forth.
All of this might sound quite trivial, and perhaps it is, but it certainly hit me like a wall of bricks to realise that we're hurtling forwards without a reverse gear.
I've come to think of this as starkly beautifully in its own way -- you can never re-create the feeling of a specific time and place, and that's what makes it special and wonderful in its own right. Take each day as it comes.