So many of us live our lives afraid of dying. For me, my constant goal is to live my life without this fear of death.

Death is the one thing in life of which we can be absolutely certain, so what is the point of worrying constantly about it?

We are so afraid of death that we don’t want to talk about it or think about it. In many cases it is so controlling that it prevents us from taking risks, or doing things we would otherwise do because of the calculated or perceived dangers involved.

On top of that, we live in an age where he who lives the longest and looks the youngest, wins. The many generations before us didn’t have this luxury, and maybe there is something we can learn from them.

However, we tend to look at the way death is treated in some cultures, and in the relics of our own, as something macabre and disturbing.

Memento Mori (Remeber Death), was a phrase coined as part of an age when death was nothing to be feared, a natural progression of life. Life that was often too short because of disease, disaster and war.

Skulls came into popular use in art as part of this (even to the point of using death as an art form when we think of the Catacombs beneath Paris, and the Seldec Ossuary in Kutna Hora, outside Prague), to remind us that life is short and we should do the most we can with it while we have it.

This wasn’t a recommendation to live with complete indulgence, but rather to live with an attitude that we can change things — to seek to live a life that makes a difference in an increasingly mean and dark world.

‘Memento Mori’ is a reminder to me to be a catalyst for change, to be the change I want to see. Of course, that’s a bit goal, and I’m very human — I mess up and get it wrong all the time, but it doesn’t change the goal 🙌🏽

So this background image is of a coffin ⚰️. It’s not my coffin, that delicious work of art is still in the design process 😅 #notevenlying