This I Believe Creative Writing

I’m going to die someday, I thought to myself one day. I was laying in bed, waiting for sleep to come, when I suddenly realized that one day (decades and decades from now, if I am lucky) I would go to sleep one day and not wake up. This thought terrified me, and I jolted out of bed just to make myself feel alive. After a few moments of panic and deep breathing, I felt myself overwhelmed with a distinct sense of calm and peace. Yes, I’m going to die someday, I thought. But I’m not going to let that rule my life until it happens. From that moment on, I chose to live my life based on the personal belief that the life I have now is all I have left, something I feel is incredibly important to me as an individual living life on this planet.
That night, jolting out of bed in a panic, was a key experience that helped me arrive at the belief that we must make the most out of the finite life we are given. Part of this panic came from the idea that I wasn’t doing anything – I wasn’t doing enough or making enough of the time I had on this earth. What was I doing sleeping when I should be spending every waking second making my dreams come true? Luckily, I was able to calm myself down and give myself some perspective – I do need sleep to live as long as I possibly can, and there would be plenty of time to figure out what I wanted to do with my life and enact it. While this did not send me into a complete frenzy of mid-life crisis-level introspection and daredevil globetrotting, it did give me the motivation to start several important projects I would never have mustered up the energy to start had I not reminded myself I have a ticking time clock on my life.
Before this point, I never really thought about death. While I was somewhat religious as a result of my upbringing when I was a child, it was never something that sank in to me as a serious belief. To that end, I never considered the idea of my life stopping until this moment a few years ago, when I truly faced the prospect of everything I know, every experience I would ever have, ending. Even after that point, my particular stance on life based on that realization has changed; at first, I simply chose to pretend I would never die, so that I would not have to think about it and simply go about my life happy. However, over time I would start to return to that realization in my head – to that end, I chose to simply accept it and incorporate it into my worldview. While, as before, I try to live each day to the fullest because nothing is wrong, now I frame the success of a day on what I still have and appreciate.
Today, I live my life with the personal belief that today is really all we have, and that life is too short to waste doing nothing. Every so often, I check in with myself to ask, “when I’m on my deathbed, will I look back on this day and smile?” If I can’t honestly say ‘yes,’ I try my best to do something about it. This personal belief system has helped me gain a greater appreciation for the life I have, and has taught me not to waste it. Starting out as a simple moment of panic at the realization of my mortality in the middle of the night, this has turned into a revolutionary change of viewpoint in my own life. While it is true that we will all die someday, we do not have to live our lives as though they do not matter – on the contrary, it is our mortal nature that makes our lives that much more important.