To Death, with Love

In our modern society, there’s no subject we fear more than death. We don’t talk about it, we don’t prepare for it. We try hard to never think about it. We insulate ourselves from coming into contact with it. We close the coffins of our loved ones, and we go to safe supermarkets to buy animals that have been slaughtered by others. We don’t want to see it, we don’t want to remember it. We suppress any thought of it and any emotion. But what if by doing so we lose the most precious ally life has given us?

I love the way Mexicans deal with death. For a couple of days every year, the 1st and 2nd of November, they celebrate Dia de Los Muertos, the day of the dead. It's a way to remember their loved ones who have passed away but it’s much more than this. It’s a way to befriend death. And they do it beautifully with their brightly coloured masks and costumes. For those two days, death is not something feared. Death is invited, celebrated joked about and danced with. For those two days, death finally finds its place among the living. And adults, elderly and children all take part in these celebrations.

In my 20 years of career in management consulting and countless transformation projects across many industries, I came across one big problem: the fear of change. People don’t like to change. Organisations don’t like to change. They delay it as much as possible until issues come up, and decay shows up. When they finally start a transformation programme, they drag their feet and go slowly holding on to each and every piece of the past with a ferocious grip. Even when they know that the best is yet to come, they still don’t want to give up the old. Top management does it, middle management does it and every single employee does it too. Most of my time on those projects has been spent holding the hands of people afraid to go through change. You may say afraid to go through death.

Why is that?

Because change is death.

In order for a new reality to come through, the old one needs to die. For a new process to function, the old one needs to be scrapped. To move to a new home, you need to leave the old one behind. And so on. And all these events are mini deaths. And in our modern society, we have not been taught how to deal with death.

The traditional societies had rites of passage. These were in fact mini deaths; this was their training in dying. Coming of age was marked by rituals sometimes even tattoos. Getting married was marked by extensive celebrations and a complete change of place in society. And so on. The person undergoing a rite of passage would never be able to go back to how she or he was before. That reality was dead for them, and because of this, they were free to fully step into a new one. But in our modern world rites of passage have been lost and with that an important way of befriending death.

And so, because we don’t experience it, we push it to a faraway corner of our minds and imagine this is something we’ll only have to deal with only once many, many, years from now.

Another reason why we fear death is that it’s deeply connected to our ego. If you are one of the people who believe in life after death what is there to fear? Your soul will survive. Your ego won’t though. All these neuronal connections will be gone rotting with the brain that produced them. All the patterns. The memories will survive, and you will take them with you. The love you shared will still be there... But the neuronal connections won't. They will need to go.

And this is exactly what happens when we go through a personal transformation. A part of us needs to die. Some outdated neuronal connections need to go. And it is essential that they go so that new ones can take their place. Our ego knows this and fears it because our ego is the sum of those neuronal connections. For our ego, death is really the end of the reality it knows. The end of those neuronal connections. The end of it all.

After all, a caterpillar must feel like dying before the butterfly emerges.

So, powered by the fear our ego feels, we go through life resisting change. Resisting any mini death. Cuddling our traumas, our identities even when we feel we have outgrown them. Seeing the same people, following the same routines. Keeping the same opinions.  Being stuck in relationships with the wrong people. We do this out of a feeling of safety that whispers “If all is the same you’re still here, you haven’t died yet”. And so death is pushed away to a far corner of our subconscious mind where it grows and grows and becomes the biggest enemy of all.

What if we took another approach? What if we befriend death? What if we let it teach us how to fully live?

When we go through a mini death concisely, when we let go of that thought pattern, previous identity, a bad relationship or a non-working business model when we find our courage to finally do this, several things happen. First, we find out that it’s not as scary as we thought it would be. Death blinks an eye, sends us a smile and whispers “Welcome darling! Let’s dance! I’ll show you I can be sweet!”

And as you take the first steps and willingly allow yourself to dance with death you may even discover you’re having fun along the way. As if you were in one of those celebrations that mark Dia de Los Muertos in Mexico.

Then, once those neuronal connections are burned up, something truly amazing happens – space comes in. Not new things, new people, new routines. Not at first. Only space. Empty space. And this space is the most precious gift because it is from this space that everything else that we desire will come through.

So here’s a challenge: let’s shake hands with death. Allow it to come by for a quick visit and teach you how to live better. How to live your life to the fullest. How to let go of what you no longer need. How to go through a rebirth. And little by little as you make it your friend, death will become part of your life. And then you will finally understand that death is life. It is the biggest enabler of life on this planet.

Mexicans know this. And that’s why on the Day of the Dead, they decorate their death costumes and masks with flowers.