Death - End of Self Improvement

Joan Tollifon's book Death: The End Of Self-Improvement reminds me so much of my last months with Max. It was painful and sucked the life out of me seeing him suffer. But yet, it was more devasting to live in a society where this is not considered normal and refuse to understand even when death stares in front of our nose every passing moment. 

One of the final practical lessons from Max was to embrace the nasty bits of life since it also part of being "present" in the current moment. I caught myself clearly outside of the realm of any of societal thinking and graduated as Max's Balaji. 

Oliver Burkeman's review of Joan Tollifon's book: 

The problem with most books (and articles and podcasts) about “being here now” or “embracing the present moment” is that they really aren’t. As often telegraphed by their cover images (sunsets, flowers, mountain peaks) they’re about embracing the nice bits of the present. And they generally imply that if you follow their advice, you could float contentedly through life, relishing simple pleasures and finding wonder in the everyday. In other words, they’re about the ideal person you might become if you weren’t so prone to irritability, boredom, and gloom. So they’re not actually about embracing the present at all. They’re focused on escaping it, in pursuit of a better future.

None of which could be said about Death: The End Of Self-Improvement, the latest book by the spiritual teacher Joan Tollifson. That title alone is a bracing bucket of iced water to the head. Mortality is the ultimate reminder that our fantasies of someday finally becoming perfect are inherently absurd, because that’s not how the journey will end. All we have, in place of that imagined ascent toward perfection, is a succession of present moments – until, one day, we won’t have any more. And “when the future disappears,” Tollifson writes, “we are brought home to the immediacy that we may have avoided all our lives.” If you really want to be here now, forget flowers and sunsets. Contemplate death instead.

Tollifson does so, without flinching. Among other things, the book is a memoir of her own encounters with mortality: her mother’s death, and those of close friends, then an unsparing account of her own experience of ageing – the “sagging, drooping, bulging, wrinkling, and drying up”, then colonoscopies, cancer and chemo, rectal bleeding and stoma bags. Sometimes, the reader wants to flinch. But in a way that’s no bad thing: all of this is part of experience, too. It’s not nice. But any approach to life that brackets it off as some kind of mistake, something that mustn’t be acknowledged, isn’t engaging with how things really are.