How to Live Fully: The Samurai Guide to Dying Every Day (opens in new tab)

The great paradox of human life is that our mortality is the fulcrum of our search for meaning — the yearning to make this brief lungful of life matter amid the breathless void of space and time — and yet we spend our lives obviating the fact that we are mortal. If we are lucky enough, if we are lucid enough, it may take us less than a lifetime to learn that to deny death is to deny life. Rilke knew this: “Death is our friend precisely because it brings us into absolute and passionate presenc...