How Death Brings Life Closer

We were gonna go travel the world together and jump off of things together. And he got married and then had kids and stayed in Cleveland. And for a lot of years, I felt this story that I had left him behind and that he was missing out. But the life that he lived was not a life where he stayed home.

Yeah.

It's the life where he dove in. To his family.

Yeah.

And that flipped for me. I, I felt a sense of, oh, like, wow, that, that fucking life that he's lived, man. Like, wow.

Right.

Welcome back to The Art of Accomplishment, where we explore living the life you want with enjoyment and ease. So the topic we go into today is on death and dying.

The death of the ego, the death of self, the imminent death of Brett's brother and death of people we loved.

Yeah. Living a lifestyle of people dying around you or living a lifestyle of being present to the death that's happening in you and around you all the time in all the different ways.

Yeah, and the freedom that it can offer. Here we go.

Let's do it.

Let's do it.

Years ago, when I, when I started BASE jumping, I remember reading an internet forum with a bunch of anonymous jumpers talking about the sport, talking about what it's like to live a life in the sport. And I'll never forget one of the quotes that somebody had made was that you're going to get into the sport and you're going to meet some of the most amazing people, some of the most incredible people you've ever met in your life. Diverse, talented, full of life. And you're going to become best friends with many of them. And then one by one, they're going to start dying in front of you. And when I first read that, I, of course, was like, whoa, I got to, like, lean back in my chair a little bit and process this. Yeah. And there was a part of me that was just like, this is insane. What are you doing? And I also can't deny that there was a part of me that was you know, 18-year-old kid, my entire adult life ahead of me. And I was like, you know what? Sign me up. I don't know what's coming, but sign me up. Something about that sounds like a life worth living. And I want to find out what that is.

What was that?

Yeah, there's layers to it. I think maybe the first layer was growing up on Saving Private Ryan and war movies. And there's an experience that people can have together when it's tough and when it's hard that can be really bonding and that people grow through. And I want to grow. I didn't want to live what I'd consider to be a kind of stale corporate lifestyle that left me sitting in a box. I wanted to get out there and live. And so one correlate to living life for me was to be risking it.

Even the idea that there's a safe interior is a—

Yeah.

Is an illusion that doesn't fully allow yourself to see the reality of death.

Yeah.

There is no safe, everybody dies. Everything ends.

Yeah.

I'm listening to the story and I'm like, Fascinating. And there's something even more fascinating to me is that your brother has got brain cancer and he's not doing well right now. How does this— oh, I wanted to like risk my life. And you've had many of your friends die. That reality that you read was exactly what happened to you. And you've lost many friends and you've mourned many friends and you've learned to mourn many friends. And so just to start off with, like, how is it right now? How are you doing with the fact that your brother is close to death and not even fully here anymore?

Yeah.

Ugh.

I mean, first I question— there's a way that he's actually doing extraordinarily well.

Right.

And— It's not medically. Right.

Has nothing to do with his longevity.

Yeah. However, he's doubled so far the original prognosis of his lifespan. For context, he has stage 4 glioblastoma, brain cancer.

Yeah.

Diagnosed while we were on a retreat together in May 2023. It's both facts. It's the fact that he's dying and the fact that he's here, just like for all of us. And I've been learning this from him and the way that he's been experiencing it. As he's been going deeper and deeper through this process, he's been finding more and more gratitude and more and more joy in whatever moment there is. And so there's a way that it feels like the density of life life is like compressing for him in this really beautiful way. And something that's different for me about this experience than the dozens of people that I've known over the years who have died since that initial story is that for most of them, they were surprises. They were accidents. So maybe not a surprise. Like, you'd be like, okay, I can see this one coming from a mile away. I just don't know when it's going to happen. But when it happens, you don't have a chance to say goodbye. There's no closure. It's just gone. And so—

More of an earthquake, less of a hurricane.

Right, right. And this is the hurricane.

Yeah.

Hurricane for me, I'm sort of on the peripheral. I live across the country. I have lived a different life than most of my family who lives very close to one another in Ohio. And so for them, there's like, that's the eye of the hurricane. And I'm sort of on one of the spiral arms. And in some sense, it's like core, like this is my older brother. This is my family. And I've never had a loss in my immediate family before.

Yeah, I had a, I have a couple of death stories. I had a friend, Case, who I'm sure we've spoken about on the podcast before. And Case got diagnosed with cancer. Lymphatic cancer, non-Hodgkin's, I think, something like that. And in that imminent death, he woke up. He had an awakening where he saw through his personality and who he became, who he saw himself as was universal, right? One with everything. He was stoked. It was great. And then found out that he got cured of the cancer and it all went away. And then I got to know him and then he got cancer again and was curing the cancer and died of a heart attack. But I asked him, you know, when you came back to being alive, like, and you knew you were going to live and the awakening went away for you, how did you like, come back to the awakening? And he said, oh, it's like when I found out, I realized it was never gone. And there's something about what you just said, an o, compressing of a life. There's a way in which when we acknowledge death, not just the death of my brother's gonna die, but the death of I'm never gonna be who I was yesterday. Parts of me die all the time. My identity dies on a regular basis. When we really acknowledge that everything is fleeting, and I don't mean it just intellectually, I mean like physically, viscerally acknowledge it, there's something that happens that is very much compresses life, so to speak. Everything becomes sweeter or more vibrant or more meaningful.

Yeah, there's a phenomenon often described by people in the sport or in life in general who have a near-death experience where there's that, oh shit, there I was, and being eaten by the bear moment. And oftentimes people reflect, and I've had these experiences, I can reflect on in that moment what I would have anticipated feeling free falling toward rocks and I'm not sure my parachute's gonna open 'cause something's anomalous or weird, that I would anticipate feeling terror. And often what actually happens is a sense of peace.

Yeah.

And people describe that and they're like, well, that's just kind of bizarre. I had that experience. And then, you know, they turn away from it 'cause it was brought up in this like intense moment. But there's ways that these intense moments can simply make us aware of what's already there the way that you described with Kees.

What's interesting is I do see that the acknowledgement of our death, the fleetingness, like best case scenario, the last person to remember me is gonna be from 2,000 years.

If you're super lucky, like 2,000 years.

If that's even luck, right? But the most likely scenario is that like in 50 years, there will be no memory of me with anybody ever. And so, like, to fully allow that in, to mourn that, to feel that all the way, really makes the self very unimportant. And I think that that's what death does on some level, is like, when we almost die, when somebody dies, it, it like rips a hole through what we think is reality. And it says, see, there's really, there's this big abyss, there's this big nothingness. You might not wanna look at it, but that's the deal. And going into it can create a tremendous amount of relief and freedom. And it's often when you hear me talking about going into the abyss, when someone's like scared of something and I say, oh, go into the abyss, I'm not pointing at anything significantly different than, It's going into the place you're scared of, and the place you're scared of is where you don't exist. Or what you think you are changes dramatically. And it can be seen really in every moment. Every moment that we exist, there's a death. There's some part of me that's not gonna ever exist again. So even if I'm remembered, like, is it the one that is speaking now that's remembered, or is it the one from 5 years ago that was remembered? I can't even remember the one 5 years ago. That walked around as Joe Hudson. There's something about the reality of death that, you said it really well, compresses life. And you compress it enough and it's, it's like it becomes everything and nothing.

Yeah, we used to always say the closer you get to death, the closer you get to life at the same time.

Right.

So what's the value in exploring this and recognizing the way that they're dying every moment? The way that their relationship is dying every moment, the way that their company, their vision is changing every second and is never what it was before. Like, what are the ways in which we can recognize and be close to and have a relationship with death in our daily life that isn't, say, like morbid navel-gazing, you know?

That's so funny. Yeah, there's nothing in me that feels like any of it's morbid. It feels like so life-affirming.

Yeah.

But I understand the question or how somebody would come up with that thought process. So the way I would say it is, if you're in a business and you don't wanna see reality as it is, you're not gonna do very well in that business. It doesn't mean that you don't wanna change it. It doesn't mean that you don't want to influence it, but to just know what's actually happening, to really have the real data of the situation changes the way that you're gonna do that business and it changes how effective you're gonna be. Similarly, if you really understand the reality of life and death, if you really sit with the fact that there's a truth that we will all die, there's a moment that's like, "Oh," and then there's a moment of great relief. There's a moment of seeing through the illusion. And so for me, my personal story around this was I came upon a question. What am I? And in that, there's this recognition of, oh wait, there's a way in which everything is fleeting. And I remember reading the story of Buddha's awakening, and apparently the first thing he said, so the story goes, is, "Coming, coming, going, going." Everything comes and goes. And the recognition of that may be scary at first, but at some point there's a peace to it because Life doesn't— it can't be personal anymore. When you realize you're not your thoughts, because you can't even control them, you can't even decide what your next thought's going to be, you can't even stop them. So that, that can't be you, right? And I'm not my emotions because it's the same thing, I can't control them, they just come and go. There's a way in which there's a, like, a peace that's available because there's not this constant struggle to maintain a life, an identity a sense of self that inherently is flawed, weak, vulnerable, constantly dying. And to not take life personally is really an amazing, an amazing feeling of freedom. And I'm talking about an extreme, but if you make it really realistic and like right away, there was something that whoever's listening to got triggered by 6 years ago. They get triggered when somebody said something to them. And today, that thing that triggered them doesn't trigger them anymore because they don't take it personally anymore. And so if you just take that freedom and you times it by a billion, that's the freedom you feel when you realize everything just dies. There's no such thing as some stability. And instead of, "Oh my God, what am I gonna do?" it becomes, "Oh, there's a lot of freedom." At first you jump off and you're like, I'm falling. Then you realize there's no bottom. And then you're like, I'm flying. This is fantastic. And so that's the situation, is just that knowing of everything is dying. Everything's dead. Everything, you can't survive this.

Yeah, there's also the aspect of like, you don't know what you've had until you're faced with losing it. And a kind of fun twist on that is you don't know what pillars of identity, for example, your life is built on until you are faced with losing them.

Yeah.

In many instances. So for myself, I've had years of my life where all of my activities and my thoughts were organized around a pattern of living that I wasn't aware was actually meant to avoid the death of some aspect of myself that was— Yeah. Toast anyway.

Right.

On a longer timeline.

Exactly.

Even a short enough timeline, you know, like— Yeah. And this can happen in a relationship too. If you have the ideal of a relationship and you're defending that that ideal is reality, rather than discovering what reality is throughout the process and allowing your ideas of it to die, then more and more in your life has to be some form of swimming back upstream against the tide. Yeah.

So make it real for me. There's this death happening in your life right now with your brother. Like, what part of you is being asked to die? What part of you, like, what's happening in that experience for you? Ooh. Immediately what I notice is in you and me, probably in the audience, it's like this, happens.

This—

yeah, like it's almost a vacuum. And that is the somatic experience of what we're often avoiding.

Yeah. And one of the first things that came to me that, that I had to die was I had had a story that, you know, years ago my brother and I got into skydiving together, basically around the same time. And had this, you know, we started my business together. We were gonna go travel the world together and jump off of things together. And he got married and then had kids and stayed in Cleveland. And for a lot of years, I felt this story that I had left him behind and that he was missing out. And hadn't recognized how subconscious lodged that story had been.

Yeah.

And some sense of guilt, like I need to go back sometime and free him in some way. I don't know, bring him into my business. Like, there was just something going on.

Yeah.

That was just nonsensical, but it was in the background of my awareness for years. And then very quickly upon hearing the news of his cancer, immediately that flipped. And I was like, he now has two kids. In their early teens that he never could have had if he was on that adventure we were on together, if he'd stayed. Maybe in some other machination that could have occurred. But the life that he lived was not a life where he stayed home. It's the life where he dove in to his family. And that flipped for me. I felt a sense of, not envy, but a sense of like, oh, like, wow, that fucking life that he's lived, man. Like, wow.

Right.

I just— so the story fell away that we were on some different level somehow and that like I had escaped and he hadn't, or that I had abandoned him and he— all of that fell away.

It's like the only thing that can be there is the now, 'cause it's the only thing you know you've got. He's not dead today. And so, all you really have is, like, this moment with him. And somehow or another, our stories don't get to exist in that moment. And similarly, when you acknowledge your own death, your stories of yourself don't get to really, like— What does it mean that you didn't get your house by the time you were 40 when you're dead? What the fuck does that mean?

Yeah.

What does it mean that you didn't make enough spiritual progress? You didn't develop enough. You didn't build a billion-dollar business. There's two people. One guy built a billion-dollar business and he's dead, and somebody didn't build a billion-dollar business and he's dead. Like, what the fuck does it make a difference? Right?

Yeah.

I mean, we don't even know all the people who built billion-dollar businesses today, and they sure as hell won't be remembered any more than And if you're remembered, what does that matter if you're dead? I'm dead, but I'm remembered. Like, who? All of these things that the ego hangs on to, the stories just don't get to survive death.

How much are the stories there just to help us prevent ourselves from feeling the closeness of death at any moment?

Yeah, exactly.

How would it be if you're driving down the road every day and you're aware of the 3 inches on your steering wheel you are away from, right, from death.

Yeah, yeah. The interesting thing that when you say that is that there's also something really sweet. There's something really sweet about the fact that, that that's, that's our reality that we don't get to taste if we don't acknowledge it. And so I have this poem, and So I was talking about Kase earlier, and this is what I wrote at his funeral. I wrote, at your funeral, even in the full light of recognition that we cannot survive this life, we cannot help but pretend we are forever. We see there hasn't been a second we have survived, ceaseless in delivering our every dying moments. That we throw together and project into an unknown future. I fall to my knees in gratitude for this illusion of me. It is what has allowed me to laugh and cry with you, my friend, and is what allows me to feel the endless depth of missing you now. Oh, wow.

Yeah.

And there's just a sweetness that you don't get to touch if you don't acknowledge that. The death, the void, the emptiness.

Yeah. Reminds me of the last time I was with my brother and my sister. You know, of course, the plan is to miraculously cure brain cancer. And also by acknowledging the situation, that we were able to have the moment where my brother held my sister and I close. He's the older brother to both of us. Yeah. And he was able to just say, "Hey, it's been an honor to grow up with both of you." Yeah. And that's something I've never got with any of my friends who died. They never had a moment to say something like that to me. They just— it's like they went around the corner and never came back. And having that happen so many times in my life has gotten me into the practice of always saying goodbye, like it's the last time, because it might be. And there's a sweetness in the reality that now when it is my brother, my biological brother, who's facing death at any unknown time, that I actually do have time to have these moments with him. Like I never had with many of the people close to me. And if we were not acknowledging the, we'll call it the possibility, that anytime I see him could be the last, we wouldn't be having the kinds of conversations that we've had. We wouldn't be having the moments we're having together in the time that we have now. And when he first told me about the cancer, and I stepped away, we continued facilitating the retreat we were facilitating.

I remember that.

And then after it was done, I, like, that's when my processing really began. And I called him back up and I was like, Scott, so realistically, there's a reality where we could have spent the rest of our lives seeing each other every couple of years. And, you know, making small talk around the kids or whatever, and having conversations about business and stuff going on in the world. And then there's a world where maybe you're not here for another year. And in that amount of time, there's a world where we can have a deeper relationship than we ever would have had otherwise. Yeah. And so let's lean into that.

Yeah, that's the opportunity, because when that acknowledgement is there, then you get that deeper opportunity every, every time, every moment.

It's almost as though the, the way that, that Those words that I read on the BASE jumping forum hit me was in that part where it's like, "Here's a way that all of your stories can be ripped away." That's the promise of that kind of sport.

Even if it doesn't happen forever, when you're flying and you're near death and all the stories go away and there's just this moment, there's just the now that you get to live in. Mm. And all that's required is you to just see the truth of what you are, the truth of your fleetingness, and then that's— life can become that flow.

Yeah. And it can be a 1-minute wingsuit flight, or it can be a lifestyle.

It can be a lifestyle. Awesome.

Yeah.

Yeah. And I'm just really sorry that your brother's dying, man.

Me too.

Yeah.

And he's really fucking living. And he's really fucking living. Yeah. Yeah. It's changed my concept of what living might entail. Yeah. You know, when he told me a few weeks ago, he's just like, yeah, I'm just lying in bed some days. I can't even move. Get out of bed, but when I just hear the door opening and closing with my kids running in and out of the house playing, I'm— I could never be happier. Yeah.

Yeah.

So my stories of what I require to enjoy my life, fucking gone. Like—

But my tea's too hot.

Yeah. Yeah.

Awesome.

Yeah, thank you, Joe.

Thank you, man.

The Art of Accomplishment was produced and hosted by myself, Brett Kistler, and Joe Hudson. Munyi Kelly is our production coordinator, and Reasonable Volume edited this episode.