This is truly one of my favourite poems.
For me, it provides a framework of sorts for how I see the world and my part in it.
It isn’t how we die that matters, so much as how we lived.
But the question can be of both, and the means the measure of our existence.
I have always loved to challenge life.
And that ‘testing’, has left me with some clarity as to the importance of challenge.
To not challenge is to simply exist. And to each of us, challenge may well represent something completely different.
I am well into my twentieth test of my Survivability.
Suffice to say that the learning process has been long, and often arduous.
I carry some of those scars, externally, and some internally.
But the reality is that even with all of the physical constraints that my irrational response to the living of life have held for me, I’d probably do them all again.
So, no matter your challenge, be it the climbing of mountains, diving to the depths of oceans or facing your own mortality, –do it with passion, with gusto and with the full realization that you are most alive while doing so.
We are here for such a short time, no do-over, no passage to something else.
No.
This is it.
So when that day does come and you know it has arrived, raise your fist and remain as willful and inviolate as you were throughout your short spin around the solar system, however many times that might have been.
And say to yourself, and to those you love…
It was a hell of a ride, and I rode it right to the end…