September 8, 2025
Death is a topic most of us try to avoid, even though it’s the one guarantee we all share. We dodge it in conversation, we disguise it with euphemisms, and we pretend we’re too busy living to think about it. But the truth is, our relationship with death says a lot about how we’re living.
If you value life so much that death terrifies you, you risk clutching at existence without really experiencing it. Fear of death can trap us in the shallow end of life, where we play it safe, keep our heads down, and hope nothing bad happens. But the Thought of the Day flips that script. It asks us not to cling to life out of fear, but to cherish it so deeply that we’d be willing to give it up, for love, for family, for someone else’s well-being.
That doesn’t mean recklessness. It doesn’t mean chasing danger for its own sake. What it means is living with a posture of openness, where your days are not about preserving yourself but about pouring yourself out.
I see this in little moments. When my kids climb into my lap after a long day, I realize that the real value of my life is in the love I give them. When I carve out time for my wife, even though my brain is still spinning with work tasks, I see how my presence, my actual, undistracted self, is worth more than any productivity metric I cling to. Even small acts of sacrifice remind me that life’s value is multiplied when shared.
And maybe that’s the paradox: the less we obsess about holding on to life, the richer it becomes. A life cherished is not a life clutched tightly in fear. It’s one lived with enough courage that, if the ultimate sacrifice was asked, we could say yes. Not because life isn’t valuable, but because it’s too valuable to waste on self-preservation alone.
So maybe the question to carry today isn’t about whether you’d sacrifice your life in some dramatic, movie-worthy moment. Maybe it’s about the daily chances to give yourself away in small, unglamorous ways. To lay down your pride. To lay down your distractions. To lay down the false sense of control we all try to keep.
Cherish your life not by protecting it from every shadow, but by letting it be light for others.
🧠 Read the full blog post where I explore this Thought of the Day and the Question of the Day
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