The 50th Law (27 page)

Certain things mattered to him more than anything else—maintaining his long-term mobility, working with those who were excited and not mercenary, controlling his image and not muddying it for the sake of quick money. What this translated into was simple: he would exercise his power to walk away from any situation or person that compromised these values. He would tell the company trying to renegotiate terms that he was no longer interested in working with them. With the record label, he would ignore the ploy and pour his own money into the marketing of his album, with the idea of leaving them soon and striking out on his own. He would cut loose the former friends, without a second thought.

In his experience, whenever he felt as if he had too much to lose and he held on to others or to deals out of fear of the alternative, he ended up losing a lot more. He realized that the key in life is to
always
be willing to walk away. He was often surprised that in doing so, or even feeling that way, people would come back to him on his terms, now fearing what they might lose in the process. And if they didn’t return, then good riddance.

If he had thought about it at the time, he would have realized that turning his back in this way was an attitude and philosophy that had crystallized in his mind that afternoon of the shooting, when death had brushed against him. Clinging to people or situations out of fear is like desperately holding on to life on even the worst terms, and he had now moved far beyond such a point. He was not afraid of death, so how could he be afraid of anything anymore?

The Fearless Approach

PEOPLE TALK ABOUT MY GETTING SHOT LIKE IT REPRESENTED SOMETHING SPECIAL. THEY ACT LIKE THEY’RE NOT FACING THE SAME THING. BUT SOME DAY EVERYBODY HAS TO FACE A BULLET WITH HIS OR HER NAME ON IT.

—50 Cent

With the language skills that our primitive ancestors developed, we humans became rational creatures, gaining the ability to look into the future and dominate the environment. But with this good came a bad that has caused us endless suffering—unlike any other animal, we are conscious of our mortality. This is the source of all our fears. This consciousness of death is nothing more than a thought of the future that awaits us, but this thought is associated with intense pain and separation. It comes with an attendant thought that occasionally haunts us—what good is it to work so hard, defer immediate pleasures, and accumulate money and power, if one day, perhaps tomorrow, we die? Death seems to cancel out all our efforts and make things meaningless.

If we were to give ourselves up to these two trains of thought—the pain and the meaninglessness—we would almost be paralyzed into inaction or driven to suicide. But consciously and unconsciously we invented two solutions to this awareness. The most primitive was the creation of the concept of an afterlife that would alleviate our fears and give our actions in the present much meaning. The second solution—the one that has come to dominate our thinking in the present—is to attempt to forget our mortality and bury ourselves in the moment. This means actively repressing any thought of death itself. To aid in this, we distract our minds with routines and banal concerns. Occasionally we are reminded of our fear when someone close to us dies, but generally we have developed the habit of drowning it out with our daily concerns.

The problem, however, is that this repression is not really effective. We generally become conscious of our mortality at the age of four or five. At that moment, such a thought had a profound impact on our psyches. We associated it with feelings of separation from loved ones, with any kind of darkness, chaos, or the unknown. And it troubled us deeply. This fear has sat inside of us ever since. It is impossible to completely eradicate or avoid such an immense thought; it sneaks in through another door, seeps into our behavior in ways we cannot even begin to imagine.

Death represents the ultimate reality—a limit to our days and efforts in a definitive fashion. We have to face it alone and leave behind all that we know and love—a complete separation. It is associated with physical and mental pain. To repress the thought, we must then avoid anything that reminds us of death. We therefore indulge in all kinds of fantasies and illusions, struggling to keep out of our minds any kind of hard and unavoidable reality. We cling to jobs, relationships, and comfortable positions, all to elude the feeling of separation. We grow overly conservative because any kind of risk might entail adversity, failure, or pain. We keep ourselves surrounded by others to drown out the thought of our essential aloneness. We may not be consciously aware of this, but in the end we expend an intense amount of psychic energy in these repressions. The fear of death does not go away; it merely returns in smaller anxieties and habits that limit our enjoyment of life.

There is a third and fearless way, however, to deal with mortality. From the moment we are born, we carry inside ourselves our death. It is not some outside event that ends our days but something within us. We have only so many days to live. This amount of time is something unique to us; it is ours alone, our only true possession. If we run away from this reality by avoiding the thought of death, we are really running away from ourselves. We are denying the one thing that cannot be denied; we are living a lie. The fearless approach requires that you accept the fact that you have only so much time to live, and that life itself inevitably involves levels of pain and separation. By embracing this, you embrace life itself and accept everything about it. Depending on a belief in an afterlife or drowning yourself in the moment to avoid pain is to despise reality, which is to despise life itself.

When you choose to affirm life by confronting your mortality, everything changes. What matters to you now is to live your days well, as fully as possible. You could choose to do this by pursuing endless pleasures, but nothing becomes boring more quickly than having to always search for new distractions. If attaining certain goals becomes your greatest source of pleasure, then your days are filled with purpose and direction, and whenever death comes, you have no regrets. You do not fall into nihilistic thinking about the futility of it all, because that is a supreme waste of the brief time you have been given. You now have a way of measuring what matters in life—compared to the shortness of your days, petty battles and anxieties have no weight. You have a sense of urgency and commitment—what you do you must do well, with all of your energy, not with a mind shooting off in a hundred directions.

To accomplish this is remarkably simple. It is a matter of looking inward and seeing death as something that you carry within. It is a part of you that cannot be repressed. It does not mean that you brood about it, but that you have continual awareness of a reality that you come to embrace. You convert the terrified, denial-type relationship to death into something active and positive—finally released from pettiness, useless anxieties, and fearful, timid responses.

This third, fearless way of approaching death originated in the ancient world, in the philosophy known as Stoicism. The core of Stoicism is learning the art of how to die, which paradoxically teaches you how to live. And perhaps the greatest Stoic writer in the ancient world was Seneca the Younger, born around 4 B.C. As a young man, Seneca was an extremely gifted orator, which led to a promising political career. But as part of a pattern that would continue throughout his life, this gift incurred the envy of those who felt inferior.

In
A.D.
41, with trumped-up charges from an envious courtier, Emperor Claudius banished Seneca to the island of Corsica, where he would languish essentially alone for eight long years. Seneca had been familiar with Stoic philosophy, but now on this barely inhabited island he would have to practice it in real life. It was not easy. He found himself indulging in all kinds of fantasies and falling into despair. It was a constant struggle, reflected in his many letters to friends back in Rome. But slowly he conquered all of his fears by first conquering his fear of death.

He practiced all kinds of mental exercises, imagining painful forms of death and possible tragic endings. He would make them familiar and not frightening. He used a sense of shame—to fear his mortality would mean he abhorred nature itself, which decreed the death of all living things, and that would mean he was inferior to the smallest animal that accepted its death without complaint. Slowly he extirpated this fear and felt a sense of liberation. Feeling that he had a mission to communicate this newfound power of his to the world, he wrote at a furious pace.

In
A.D.
49 he was finally exonerated, recalled to Rome, and appointed to a high position as praetor and private tutor to the twelve-year-old boy Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus (soon to be known as Emperor Nero). During the first five years of Nero’s reign, Seneca was the de facto ruler of the Roman Empire, as the young Emperor gave himself over to the pleasures that were to later dominate his life. Seneca had to constantly struggle to rein in some of Nero’s violent tendencies, but for the most part those years were prosperous and the empire was well governed. Then envy set in again, and Nero’s courtiers began spreading stories that Seneca was enriching himself at the expense of the state. By
A.D.
62, Seneca could see the writing on the wall, and he retired from public life to a country house, handing over almost all of his wealth to Nero. In
A.D.
65 he was implicated in a plot to kill the emperor, and an officer was sent to, in the Roman style, order Seneca to kill himself.

He calmly asked permission to review his will. This was refused. He turned to his friends who were present and said, “Being forbidden to show gratitude for your services, I leave you my one remaining possession and my best: the pattern of my life.” Now he would be reenacting what he had rehearsed in his mind so many years before. His ensuing suicide was horrifically difficult—he sliced the veins in his arms and ankles, sat in a hot bath to make the blood flow faster, and even drank poison. The death was slow and incredibly painful, but he maintained his calmness to the end, making sure that everyone would see that his death matched his life and his philosophy.

As Seneca understood, to free yourself from fear you must work backward. You start with the thought of your mortality. You accept and embrace this reality. You think ahead to the inevitable moment of your death and determine to face it as bravely as possible. The more you contemplate your mortality, the less you fear it—it becomes a fact you no longer have to repress. By following this path, you know how to die well, and so you can now begin to teach yourself to live well. You will not cling to things unnecessarily. You will be strong and self-reliant, unafraid to be alone. You will have a certain lightness that comes with knowing what matters—you can laugh at what others take so seriously. The pleasures of the moment are heightened because you know their impermanence and you make the most of them. And when your time to die comes, as it will some day, you will not cringe and cry for more time, because you have lived well and have no regrets.

Keys to Fearlessness

THERE SEEMS TO HOVER SOMEWHERE IN THAT DARK PART OF ALL OUR LIVES…AN OBJECTLESS, TIMELESS, SPACELESS ELEMENT OF PRIMAL FEAR AND DREAD, STEMMING, PERHAPS, FROM OUR BIRTH…A FEAR AND DREAD WHICH EXERCISES AN IMPELLING INFLUENCE UPON OUR LIVES…. AND, ACCOMPANYING THIS FIRST FEAR, IS, FOR THE WANT OF A BETTER NAME, A REFLEX URGE TOWARD ECSTASY, COMPLETE SUBMISSION, AND TRUST.

—Richard Wright

In the past, our relationship to death was much more physical and direct. We would routinely see animals killed before our eyes—for food or sacrifices. During times of plague or natural disasters we would witness countless deaths. Graveyards were not hidden away but would occupy the center of cities or adjoin churches. People would die in their homes, surrounded by friends and families. This nearness of death increased the fear of it but also made it seem more natural, much more a part of life. To mediate this fear, religion would play a powerful and important role.

The dread of death, however, has always remained intense, and with the waning of the power of religion to soothe our anxieties, we found it necessary to create a modern solution to the problem—we have almost completely banished the physical presence of death. We do not see the animals being slaughtered for our food. Cemeteries occupy outlying areas and are not part of our consciousness. In hospitals, the dying are cloistered from sight, everything made as antiseptic as possible. That we are not aware of this phenomenon is a sign of the deep repression that has taken place.

We see countless images of death in movies and in the media, but this has a paradoxical effect. Death is made to seem like something abstract, nothing more than an image on the screen. It becomes something visual and spectacular, not a personal event that awaits us. We may be obsessed with death in the movies we watch, but this only makes it harder to confront our mortality.

Banished from our conscious presence, death haunts our unconscious in the form of fears, but it also reaches our minds in the form of the Sublime. The word “sublime” comes from the Latin, meaning up to the threshold or doorway. It is a thought or experience that takes us to the threshold of death, giving us a physical intimation of this ultimate mystery, something so large and vast it eludes our powers of description. It is a reflection of death in life, but it comes in the form of something that inspires awe. To fear and avoid our mortality is debilitating; to experience it in the Sublime is therapeutic.

Children have this encounter with the Sublime quite often, particularly when confronted with something too vast and incomprehensible for their understanding—darkness, the night sky, the idea of infinity, the sense of time in millions of years, a strange sense of affinity with an animal, etc. We too have these moments in the form of any intense experience that is hard to express in words. It can come to us in moments of extreme exhaustion or exertion, when our bodies are pushed to the limit; in travel to some unusual place; or in absorbing a work of art that is too packed with ideas or images for us to process rationally. The French call an orgasm “
le petit mort
,” or little death, and the Sublime is a kind of mental orgasm, as the mind becomes flooded with something that is too much or too different. It is the shadow of death overlapping our conscious minds, but inspiring a sense of something vital and even ecstatic.