Lucas's Blog

I’m not a frequenter of cemeteries by any definition.

In fact, I’d say the most I’ve visited in a calendar year I could count on one hand. In the last six months, I’ve attended four.

One back in Australia where my Nonno is buried, one in Santiago, Chile, one in Queenstown, NZ & the last in Sucre in Bolivia.

The first is slightly more personal than the other three.

Now it’s worth mentioning that I’m not traveling the world to seek out these cemeteries. Sometimes, they are interesting to visit if you’re stopping in a new place for a few days.

But outside of that, they are more or less the same.

This brings me to what I’ve learned from going to these places. On the surface level,

Cemeteries are quite morbid.

I mean there are hundreds, if not thousands of deceased people underground or in a Mausoleum (Body filing cabinet).

They’re usually surrounded by some kind of greenery, flowers & potentially by gifts left by loved ones.

After walking around the cemeteries I visited, taking deliberate notice of the messages & well wishes left by loved ones on their gravestone, I came quite clear on a few things:

What you think is important, might not be important

When you die & people want to remember you in some way, they usually distill your most proud accomplishments into the size of a Twitter post (about 160 characters).

What do people usually write for their loved ones & friends?

I’ll tell you what I’ve never seen on a headstone:

How much money you made in your career

How many extra hours have you worked for a corporation

How many times have you tried something new & failed

How many times you were embarrassed about something

Things that may have caused you great pain & effort along the way

What people usually write on headstones is the type of person you were to others.

A caring mother, A generous father, an optimistic daughter or even simply, a lover of life.

It’s the way you treat people along the journey that you’re remembered by, not the shortcomings of being.

Don’t read the above wrong, life is certainly not easy by any metric over a long enough time horizon.

But how you deal with trial & tribulation is how people will always remember you.

We are all so different, but we are all so similar

What intrigued me about seeing so many different gravestones (let me stress again, i’m not a weird cemetery guy, but I certainly have learned a lot from these places) is the similarity of these messages of mourning.

Although in Spanish, there were the same loving words printed on the graves & headstones of grandmothers from Bolivia then to unforeseen teenage deaths in New Zealand. “

Much loved by”, “Adored son of” or “the most caring father & grandfather of”

It made me realise like a shock of lightning that despite our surface level differences (heritage, language & where we live) we are all living an incredibly similar experience.

The world is experienced in over 8 Billion unique ways every day.

Multiply that by the number of years we’ve existed, and you’ve got yourself a big number.

Despite this uniqueness, the human experience is distilled so perfectly into a five key pillars.

– Families & Relationships

– Personal Growth & Fulfilment

– Health & Well-being

– Work & Purpose

– Community & Contribution

We all try and & build of these pillars up throughout our lives.

We can experience life in so many different versions, but humanity strives for a shared common goal of existence.

No matter what you do, you’ve only got so much time on the clock.

You can look at this two ways.

1. Well what’s the point? It’s all going to be over one day anyway.

2. I can literally do whatever I want while I’m here (please exercise reason here)

The first is quite a cynical way of looking at things, and one I hope the minority of people fall into.

Undoubtedly, life can be hard sometimes.

Coming from a loving household in Australia I couldn’t really say i’ve endured anything close to what people go through daily in different pockets of the globe.

The point, for those who choose to look for it, is no matter what you decide, you are going to die regardless. That is morbid, but let me explain.

You are given an undisclosed amount of time on earth when you are born.

You didn’t ask for it, you didn’t even really understand what you were getting yourself into when you swam towards that egg besides some evolutionary urge to do so.

But you are given a body & more a less a soul to get started.

After that, besides some obvious environmental factors out of control, the rest is up to you. What you choose to do, how you spend your time, how you treat people, how you hug your friends after not seeing them for a while.

The second point up there is the one I’ve become quite obsessed with over the last 3 years.

I can do whatever I want (of course, exercising reason).

Do I want to travel?

Do I want to work for someone?

Do I want kids right now?

Do I want to buy a house?

Do I want to stay fit & healthy?

The answer to all of those, of course, is primarily dictated by me.

I decided that whenever that finish line does arrive, whether it be tomorrow or in 50 years, I want to have lived on my own accord.

Doing what I’d like, chasing my own dreams not the aspirations of someone else.

I want to create & share ideas with people to hopefully inspire them to do the same.

Because at the end of it all. It doesn’t fucking matter 🙂

Those people in those cemeteries could’ve had so many hopes, dreams & actions that never got to do that frankly, no one will ever know.

Spend your time with people you love & care about, work hard, and try and find your purpose, no matter how long it takes.

Cemeteries have taught me more about life than most books.

You will be lying in one day (unless of course you get cremated and shot out of a cannon into the ocean), no matter what you do.

Choose life. (Cue born slippy)