Death Blues

Been meaning to post this for a few weeks now, but well, time flies while you're doing stupid shit, which is pretty much Jon Mueller's point:

How much time is left? Do we know? Does our plan know? What happens when we thoroughly hold and understand that our lives are finite? How does this understanding of our end shape our present? And how do we become more ‘present?’ Because each moment is an opportunity and a decision. (emphasis mine)

I can tell you that being diagnosed with a chronic disease–I have MS–does tend to shape your focus a little bit about What's Really Important, as does going through the stages of hepatic and then pancreatic cancer with your mother (miraculously unrelated) over the course of eight years, as does having a crazy chick fail to kill your younger brother simply because she neglected to chamber the first round in her .380. But even with all of this existential focussing going on, I can still drift off into complacency and time wasting with the most disaffected sixteen year old.

Gaze not too long into the abyss, lest the abyss turn its gaze upon you. ~ Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, Aphorism 146 (1886).

Conversely, while it is wise to remember that very few of us get to choose when and where to go out–the Acme safe can crush each of us at a time and place of its own choosing, by dwelling too long on our own mortality, we risk falling into The Pit we're seeking to skirt. So, without getting too much more morbid, I will point you to Jon Mueller's cool new meditative project, Death Blues: The Celebration and Opportunity of Each Moment.

His initial manifesto is here, and you can check out more of the Death Blues music on bandcamp and/or buy a physical copy here. The deathblues website has much more from Jon and others on this most important of meta topics. Thanks, Jon.