The 50th Law (with 50 Cent)

Awaken to the shortness of life.
When we unconsciously disconnect
ourselves from the awareness of death, we forge a particular
relationship to time—one that is rather loose and distended. We come
to imagine that we always have more time than is the reality. Our
minds drift to the future, where all our hopes and wishes will be
fulfilled. If we have a plan or a goal, we find it hard to commit to it with
a lot of energy. We’ll get to it tomorrow, we tell ourselves. Perhaps we
are tempted in the present to work on another goal or plan—they all
seem so inviting and different, so how can we commit fully to one or
another? We experience a generalized anxiety, as we sense the need to
get things done, but we are always postponing and scattering our
forces.
Then, if a deadline is forced upon us on a particular project, that
dreamlike relationship to time is shattered and for some mysterious
reason we find the focus to get done in days what would have taken
weeks or months. The change imposed upon us by the deadline has a
physical component: our adrenaline is pumping, filling us with energy
and concentrating the mind, making it more creative. It is invigorating
to feel the total commitment of mind and body to a single purpose,
something we rarely experience in the world today, in our distracted
state.
We must think of our mortality as a kind of continual deadline,
giving a similar effect as described above to all our actions in life. We
must stop fooling ourselves: we could die tomorrow, and even if we live
for another eighty years, it is but a drop in the ocean of the vastness of
time, and it passes always more quickly than we imagine. We have to
awaken to this reality and make it a continual meditation.
This meditation might lead some people to think, “Why bother to
try anything? What’s the point of so much effort, when in the end we
just die? Better to live for the pleasures of the moment.” This is not,
however, a realistic assessment but merely another form of evasion. To
devote ourselves to pleasures and distractions is to avoid the thought
of their costs and to imagine we can fool death by drowning out the
thought. In devoting ourselves to pleasures, we must always look for
new diversions to keep boredom at bay, and it’s exhausting. We must
also see our needs and desires as more important than anything else.
This starts to feel soulless over time, and our ego becomes particularly
prickly if we don’t get our way.

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As the years go by, we become increasingly bitter and resentful,
haunted with the sense we have accomplished nothing and wasted our
potential. As William Hazlitt observed, “Our repugnance to death
increases in proportion to our consciousness of having lived in vain.”
Let the awareness of the shortness of life clarify our daily actions.
We have goals to reach, projects to get done, relationships to improve.
This could be our last such project, our last battle on earth, given the
uncertainties of life, and we must commit completely to what we do.
With this continual awareness we can see what really matters, how
petty squabbles and side pursuits are irritating distractions. We want
that sense of fulfillment that comes from getting things done. We want
to lose the ego in that feeling of flow, in which our minds are at one
with what we are working on. When we turn away from our work, the
pleasures and distractions we pursue have all the more meaning and
intensity, knowing their evanescence.