Don't Wait Until Your Deathbed
Relax your grip on life — while you’re living it — to feel more alive.
We’re all going to die, and when it happens, we’ll be in the middle of something—a season, a month, a week, a day.
We’ll make our exit right in the middle of a news cycle. This is inevitable. We won’t have the chance to see how everything turns out. We’ll leave this world with unresolved conflicts and unfinished business. There will always be people we never properly thanked, and we won’t get to confront everyone who hurt or disappointed us.
And yet — this is the part that really gets my contemplative juices flowing — when a loved one finally gives someone at the end of their life permission to let go, they seem to instinctively understand how to do it. They let go naturally.
You’ve likely heard about this phenomenon. Maybe you’ve even witnessed it. A person nearing the end of their life continues to fight, clinging on long after it seems practical to do so. Then, a loved one leans in and softly says, “It’s okay. You don’t have to keep fighting. We love you. We understand you’re tired. While we don’t want you to leave, it’s perfectly alright for you to go when you’re ready.” And then, quietly, they do—often with a kind of grace that those watching describe as peaceful and even comforting.
I think about this a lot. Not the dying, but the persistent releasable grip against whatever we don’t want to be happening. We are all walking around with some degree of gripping all of the time, whether we realize it or not. It’s a grip that signals the gap between what’s happening at any given moment and what we’d prefer were happening instead.
By default, most of us need things to be reasonably comfortable and settled before we allow ourselves to relax. This means we spend a lot of time waiting to unwind at some vague future time. We hold tightly to how things should have gone, how someone should have behaved, and how we’d like circumstances to arrange themselves before we can finally relax into our lives.
The most challenging situations for practicing this are when I’m sick or recovering from an injury. As with visiting difficult family members, I’m okay for a day or two, but then I start to wrestle with the part that’s outside my control: the unknowable amount of time it will take for the symptoms—physical or emotional—to run their course. Instead of pretending I’m okay with being uncomfortable, I practice noticing what the discomfort actually feels like to ease my resistance. I know it may not sound helpful, but it’s something you have to test for yourself.
Practicing mindfulness keeps teaching me this lesson: you don’t have to wait for ideal conditions to practice loosening your internal grip. In fact, waiting for conditions to be right is itself a form of gripping.
From the outside, mindfulness practice can seem abstract, even trivial. Who doesn’t know how to see what’s in front of their eyes, hear sounds around them, or notice that they’re breathing? But it’s actually a tangible way to develop what I’d call greater intimacy with being alive—different from relaxation, and more durable than a good mood. It includes the uncomfortable moments, the unresolved ones, and those that might never be resolved. I’m not talking about performing peace, but about developing attentional skills that help us meet whatever is present with a little less resistance.
Most guidance in this space sounds like an instruction to force yourself into a state you don’t naturally inhabit: Be grateful. Be peaceful. Let it go. The implicit message is that discomfort or uncertainty can be easily shucked off without practice. But the gap between what you’re feeling and what spiritual influencers claim you’re supposed to feel can become just one more source of internal friction. What actually helps is almost the opposite—getting genuinely curious about what’s already here: the tension, the uncertainty, whatever you’re quietly gripping.
Raising children has a way of helping us spot when we wish the present were unfolding differently. I’ve got plenty of examples of practicing this when my daughter was a teenager, but now I’m learning to explore it when I spend time with my grandchildren. It comes up when my grandson acts disappointed by a meal I prepared for him, is underwhelmed by a gift I picked up for him, or when he pushes back when I ask him to put his toys away. Cultivating a relationship with my grandchildren means navigating the emotional discomfort of keeping them safe, maintaining realistic boundaries, and easing up internally as toddlers gradually learn to express their feelings. It means catching the impulse to clench against the present, and trying to stay open to its messiness instead.
Most of us tacitly trust that nature will guide us through easing up inside on our deathbeds. But if relaxing this grip at the very end of life allows things to wind down with some ease, isn’t it worth asking whether we could spread that lesson across the years we have left? Instead of saving it for a dramatic final act, we can practice in millions of small, ordinary doses—waiting for the dentist, unloading the dishwasher, reading one more story to your kid, running errands, watering houseplants, calling a friend you haven’t talked to in a while.
At any given moment, you can ask yourself, What would this moment feel like if I relaxed my grip on it and allowed it to unfold on its own?
It’s okay. You’re tired. You’ve been fighting long enough. It’s okay if you decide not to sometimes—even when death is a long way off.
You can explore this subtle, significant shift in both pleasant and unpleasant moments. Try to get curious about what shifts when you ease up even slightly on the need for things to be other than they are.
When you can’t ease up, it’s simply not within your control. Try to ease up on not being able to ease up.
You have the rest of your life to explore, in this way, the beauty, heartbreaking vulnerability, and wonder of being alive.
Exercise
This exercise invites the body to soften its grip and experience relaxation, not by force, but through gentle permission.
Circumstances for learning this attention exercise
Waking up in the middle of the night
Taking a walk on a brisk spring day
Warming up after being cold
Cooling down after physical exercise
