Consider the following comments on mortality.
We live as if we had forever, and only borrowed time ever teaches us to choose.
Knowing we will die is the one fact that could organise a life, and the one we work hardest to forget.
Mortality is not the thief of meaning but its strange and difficult source.
It is not death that a man should fear, but never beginning to live.
Marcus Aurelius
We do not really believe in our own ending until someone we love demonstrates it for us.
Write a reflective piece in response to one or more of these comments. Your essay will be assessed on the quality of your thinking and the way you express it.
A way into this prompt
A reflective thesis is that our mortality is both the fact we most strenuously avoid and the one that, when faced, gives our choices their weight. Open with a particular encounter with finitude, perhaps a death in the family, an illness, or a birthday that landed harder than expected, when the abstract knowledge that we end became suddenly real. Then explore the tension between mortality as the thief that empties everything of point, since all will be lost, and mortality as the very thing that makes time precious and love urgent. A useful structural move contrasts the way we live in ordinary forgetfulness of death against the rare clarity that grief or fear briefly grants, and asks why the clarity never lasts. Caution: avoid the consoling neatness that death simply teaches us to live well, since the fear of it is real and not always redeemable, and the honest reflection sits with the dread as well as the lesson.