In Heidegger's classic text on the implications of death, Being and Time, he contrasts waiting with anticipation: waiting for death, like passing one's days in denial of mortality, is dismissed as fatalistic, pessimistic, a kind of giving up. Heidegger urges anticipation, which is not a kind of sitting around, mulling about, dwindling time until annihilation; anticipation of death employs our mortality as the single consideration that lifts us out of our immersion in the mundane details of daily life, freeing us to make bolder choices that embrace life, in all its ephemeral beauty.

¶ 7:23 PM