thinking of the end

as a remedy to temptation, it was once believed that you could consider the ending (i.e., the consequence) of an action, and weigh it against the possible "rewards" of any indisgression (sp?).

BUT:
when taken too far, this deadens life. after all, you could look at the entirety of life, and say that we all end up dead. if that's the case, what's the use (significance) of all our "flapping about" in the interim???

martin heidegger, in sein und zeit (being and time), adopted a similarly buddhistic outlook. death (the end) gives meaning to each action. if the end is considered in all activities, then presumably all activities are directed (focused) towards meaning, and are not "frivolous" or "distracting."

the "problem" is that we are living a story that we are not the author to. we are not privvy to when the ending will precisely take place. therefore, as we do not know what end we are headed towards, or how long we have before we "arrive" (at that destination of non-arrival), how can we "organize" our lives towards that end?

it's funny that typically, in our society, certain knowledge of the end (i.e. you have six months to live) brings about a kind of radical mid-life crisis (end-life crisis?) in which people are expected to do all of these things that they'd "meant to do" or "always secretly wanted to do"; in the movies, people act really crazy and irrational, jumping out of airplanes or riding bulls.

from an outside perspective, it sometimes seems pretty silly... but then again, there is a real energetic going on. it's like all of this energy has been saved up, conserved, so that a person could sustain him/herself over the next day and the next and the next; and suddenly, that person realizes that s/he was saving it up for nothing. no gain. no loss. and then that energy explodes.

... i mentioned this previously, with regards to reversals of cliche platitudes. "live each day as though it were your last" converted to "live your last day as though it were each [every] day." i still believe this is true. not that i am physically able to take care of everything that needs to be taken care of... far from it! but i try to live in such a way that, were i to die tonight, well, i'd have no real regrets...

funny, on a blog devoted to regrets, to speak of having none...

but i'm beginning to realize what regrets are. if you see that regret and hope are two sides of the same coin, and that regret is the shadow of a lost hope, and hope is the risk of another regret, then BOTH cease to become very problematic. regret and hope are just a natural part of life, just as memory and projection are natural "tools" in our progression through life. neither are particularly good or bad. it's just the fixation on one or the other, and the inability to see life as it is that becomes- imbalanced...