| Preparing to Die, Wealth and Happiness |
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Among the holidays and long weekends is All Saints' Day (November 1). All Saints Day (November 1) honors those who have attained the beatific vision in heaven. Halloween is the day preceding it, while the next day, All Souls' Day, commemorates the departed faithful who have not yet been purified and reached heaven. Speaking of the dead and death, I recall a statement of Grissom in the last episode of CSI-Las Vegas (Season 6) to the effect that he prefers having a cancer because he could prepare for his death and he could say goodbye to his loved ones. In contrast, of course, is the view that death should be more like a thief who sneaks in the night, in which case, you do away with the agony of watching your days run out. For a moment, I tried to think of my own preference. However, the more I tried to decide on which outlook I prefer, the more I realized that the choices are misleading. One does not prepare for death; one accepts the fact that death comes to us all. This reminds me of another all-time favorite series of mine - Band of Brothers. In a scene with Private Blithe, Lt. Ronald Spiers said, “They just don’t see how simple it is”. After an exchange of a few lines, Lt. Spiers said:
When I said one does not “prepare” for death, I didn’t use it in a sense that’s debunked by the high sales of life insurance and burial pre-need plans. It simply means that the unnecessary fear and preoccupation with death spells the difference between “living” and “existing”. The focus is not how you die, but how you lived your life. The exact meaning of that really depends on each Pinoy Entrepreneurs. An important component of life's journey is, well, not entirely money, but happiness. "A growing body of studies show that wealth alone isn't necessarily what makes us happy. After a certain income cap, we simply don't get any happier. And it isn't what we have, but whether we have more than our neighbor, that really matters. So the news last week that in 2006 top hedge-fund managers took home $240 million, minimum, probably didn't make them any happier, it just made the rest of us less so." (Newsweek, 7 May 2007) We don't really need "a growing body of studies to show that wealth alone isn't necessarily what makes us happy". As the popular credit card ad ironically tells us -- there are priceless matters that money can't buy. After all, no amount of money can bring back lost time and lost youth.
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