Choosing Meaning While I’m Still Here

I just started reading The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker, and I’m not even out of the preface yet. Still, it already opened something up in me that I wasn’t expecting.

Becker compares a person to a rock. At first it felt like a strange analogy, but then it started to make sense. He explains how we’re made up of the same stuff, protons, neutrons and atoms. The rock and I are composed of the same particles. What makes me different is how I’m configured. That one word shifted everything for me. Configuration. Because of how I’m arranged, I have consciousness. I get to feel love, pain, joy, fear, wonder. I get to ask why I’m here. A rock doesn’t get to do that.

That thought grounded me. It reminded me how much of what I experience, I create. I give meaning to things. I decide what matters. Pain and purpose, joy and suffering, connection and detachment all come from how I choose to see and live through the moment.

That brought me back to this photo. It’s from a few years ago during a spring break trip. At the time it just felt like a normal day. The kids were barefoot in the river, laughing, slipping across rocks, needing a hand but determined to make it on their own. It was calm. I remember the sound of the water, the breeze, the tiny voices asking questions about everything. Back then I didn’t realize how special that day really was.

Now I look at it and it feels like a deep exhale. A relief. It reminds me of how full life is when I slow down and notice it. It’s not the big things we plan that stay with us. It’s the small unfiltered moments where we’re just together. That day wasn’t perfect or staged. It was better than that. It was real. And when I reflect on it now, I see how much meaning was wrapped up in something so simple.

Becker talks about how we spend much of life trying to avoid the truth of death. We chase things. We build legacies. We stay busy. We try to prove we matter. But maybe the point isn’t to escape the ending. Maybe the point is to live fully while we’re here.

That’s what I want. Not just to exist but to be awake in my life. To pay attention. To laugh with my kids barefoot in the water. To feel it all and not rush past it. To remember that I’m a temporary arrangement of atoms and that in itself is kind of beautiful.

What’s a moment from your past that seemed ordinary at the time but feels priceless now? What would happen if you started treating today with that same kind of attention?