They were, in and of themselves, reasons to stay alive.

A face, a line out of a poem, the clouds out of a window, some graffiti, a wind farm. “Wherever you are, at any moment, try and find something beautiful. Here are my favorite words by Matt Haig, an English bestselling author who attempted to die by suicide 20 years ago because he, too, once believed that the suffering he had felt was grander and more pulsating than his reasons to stay alive:ġ. Perhaps by remembering death, we are also reminded of the “whys” to live.

Life doesn’t just happen in either the suffering or the joy, but perhaps in our ability to derive meaning out of each fleeting and briefly-lived moment to moment experience. Maybe through the death of a loved one, or the fallout of a romantic relationship that we thought would last forever, or a traumatic event that left us feeling helpless.īut in between the wavering dance of grief and ecstasy is where real life exists. On the contrary, we might remember a time when sadness stripped away our essence, livelihood, and the very reason to enjoy life. To the point where we wanted to suffocate those moment in between the embrace of our arms, with the intention of never letting go. Perhaps the easiest way to understand this conundrum is to remember a time when we were genuinely, truly happy, maybe while we were on a trip or lost in conversation with loved ones, or while sharing a romantic, ephemeral moment with a significant other, and how precious, fleeing, and short those moments of euphoria felt. In the Buddhist notion, too, life is long but it is also short.

But it is our mission to give this life meaning, purpose, direction, and reasons to exist for as long as it can live. According to the Buddhist notion, all life is sacred-plants, insects, animals, and, especially, humans. Of course, we can argue that people die of other horrific reasons like cancer, being caught in floods, hurricanes, and earthquakes, living under massive poverty and undergoing malnourishment, the common flu, domestic abuse that leads to death, especially amongst women and children, and simply existing in struggling countries like Palestine, Syria, Iraq, Tibet, and Afghanistan, where people have no choice but to live under atrocious circumstances pushed against them by tyrants.īut this isn’t a moral argument of which cause of death is more righteous than the other and, therefore, deserves a bigger, highlighted font in the local news. In the United States alone, suicide is the 10th leading cause of death, with approximately 47,511 Americans who died by suicide in 2019 and 1.38 million suicide attempts.

100 reasons to stay alive book