Living With Intention: Defining Our Terms
- Rachelle Innocent
- Jun 23
- 3 min read
Why Mortality Is Inherently Morbid
There are few conversations people avoid more readily than those about death and dying.
Mortality has a way of unsettling us. We push it aside, postpone thinking about it, and treat it as a problem for another day.
Until life happens.
Until we experience one of those moments that divides our lives into a before and an after.
Often in such a visceral and violent way that we find ourselves confronted with our mortality.
If the realization doesn’t rock you to your core… it may not have fully settled yet.
Whether it’s a slow realization or a brush with danger in the variety of forms it presents, we become fully aware that we are on borrowed time.
Coming to Terms and Defining Our Terms
We may not get the life we envisioned, indulge in the normalcy we take for granted, or find ourselves rubbing shoulders with the people we thought were permanently etched into the fabric of our becoming. And that might just be the best thing that ever happened to you — even if you fail to realize that in this present moment.
If we are lucky, when all is said and done, we will have lived through better and worse, coming to terms with the reality that there is very little about the future that we can predict… but if we play our hand with care, we can still live with the level of intention required to define our terms.
Despite being entirely unprepared when calamity strikes, we can choose to adapt and define our terms.
We may be ill-equipped to navigate life beyond the rose coloured lenses through which we were taught to view the world. We may find ourselves weathering one challenge after another, wondering whether Murphy's Law has taken a particular interest in us.
Even then, the choice remains ours.
There is nothing small or easy about that choice.
We can choose to grow through the discomfort and bear the weight with a smile. Mortality reminds us that time is limited; how we interpret our experiences remains ours to decide.
We may not be able to choose the ending we want, but we will always have a say on how the events in our lives serve our becoming.
And if the coin toss is always between better or worse, why not choose better and toss worse?
Fulfillment in Rising Above
Mortality has a way of clarifying what matters. When we realize our time is limited, we are forced to confront not only how we spend our days, but who we are becoming.
The majority of villains we encounter in everyday life have justified reasons for being who they are. If we walked a mile in their shoes, we can understand the path they took, despite the direction it may be leading them in.
In truth, this is mostly the case because we all have been the villain in someone’s story and can become the villain in our own. It takes the build of small compromises, conceding to our baser impulses, and betraying ourselves…breaking away from that inner voice that calls out the behaviour for what it is.
We have limited time, so why not do what you want?
Or (and this is a big “or”), why not do what you can to leave an impact that speaks to the legacy your short time on this planet left behind?
We all have the capacity to leave footprints worth stepping into and become the kind of people who inspire positive and lasting change. Why not do the best we can with the time we have, reminding life that we can rise above the unfairness in the finite nature of time.
Time is finite whether we acknowledge it or not.
We cannot choose how much of it we receive, but we can choose who we become while we have it.
If mortality gives us anything, perhaps it is that reminder: the clock is running, so become someone worth remembering.
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