(This is an old post moved from an old page, originally posted 1/9/6)
In his introduction to The Book on Adler (1846) Soren Kierkegaard makes the distinction between someone who comes to the end of his life, and someone who comes to the END of his life: “For it is one thing that a life is over, and a different thing that a life is finished by reaching its conclusion.” It dawns on me that a life may be very long-lived and yet have no real ending, and again a life may be relatively short (say, 33 years) and yet reach its purposed conclusion. But what strikes me is this: a man having reached his conclusion before his death means not only that he has died well, but that he has also lived well. His life has had purpose.
Kierkegaard continues, “For in reality it is indeed true that every man dies, his life comes to an end; but from this it does not follow that his life has an end in the sense of a conclusion, ‘that it came to an end’ – precisely this past tense shows that death is not the decisive thing, that the conclusion may fall within a man’s lifetime, and that to regard death as a conclusion is a deceitful evasion, for death is related quite indifferently to the premise of a man’s life, and therefore is not a conclusion of any sort.”
I pray that I die well because I have lived well – with purpose, and that when I die (whether that is as an old man or sometime soon) people will be able to say, “He lived his life to its conclusion.”
