Dying to Live? Stop Hoarding, Start Living!

Q: Time is in short supply in today’s world, so how do we make ourselves capable of packing as much as we can into our schedules without suffering and getting exhausted?

Sadhguru: If you are creating what you really care for, if you die of exhaustion, that’s okay. If you are not doing what really matters and creating what you care for, if you die of exhaustion just trying to earn a living, that is a stupid way to die.

Dying to Live

I remember there was a man who was living in Hyderabad. I knew the family very well and when I stayed with them, I would notice how agitated he always was. One day, he, his wife and me were having a conversation, and I was joking about how he was constantly hopping around the place all the time. His wife said, “Sadhguru, he is just dying to live.” I replied, “You said it. You got your husband right. He is a man who is dying to live.” If you live, anyway you will die. You don’t have to die to live. You just have to live, because you are a life. It is just that people either make themselves into half a life or they are dying to live. That’s not necessary. If you allow this life to function at its fullest, it will do many things.

Please understand, if you spend your lifetime trying to earn a living, it is tiring. Whether you work twenty hours, ten hours, eight hours or five hours a day, it will be tiring – whatever you do. However, when you do something that really matters to you, it may be physically exhausting, but life is not tiring because you are constantly doing what matters.

If you work five or ten years for your security, that’s okay. But if you are going to work all your life for your security, you are seeking death because death is the only secure thing in the existence. Life is never secure. You are trying to live while unknowingly working for death. Now you are dying to live, as the lady appropriately said. The man actually died a few years later.

Doing What Matters

Please see, it is not your schedule that is killing you. You are horribly preoccupied in your head – that is what is killing you. Do something that matters to you and everyone around you. Then you will see, there is a limitless intelligence and energy available to every human being. It is just that they think they are very smart building walls around themselves. If you store food for thirty days for your family, it's okay. If you store food for a hundred years, you are a nut case, aren’t you?

I was in the United States in someone’s home. I generally know the layout of these homes, how they are built, the architecture, and I know where the restrooms are, so without asking I usually find it. When I went looking for the restroom in this house, I opened a door and walked into a huge room full of footwear! I think there were around four or five hundred pairs neatly arranged.

When I spoke to the lady who owned these, I said, “I can understand you want a pair of footwear to walk around your home, another to walk up the mountain, you want one to play golf, another to wear for the party – but you have a variety of clothes so you need the whole spectrum of colors – so all these if we add up, you may need twenty, twenty-one pairs. But five hundred pairs! If you just check and see, there are only two feet. You are rich and your lifestyle is such that you have twenty-one pairs of footwear, that’s okay. But five hundred pairs! If you come back for the next fifty lifetimes, you still cannot wear all these.”

Survival should be addressed very quickly. And then you must do what really matters. If you don’t, you will never know what it means to know an exuberant level of energy, what it means to be in such a way that even if you don’t sleep through the night you are “on” in the morning. You will never know this because the doctors have told you that if you have to live till eighty, you must sleep nine hours a day. The rest of the day goes in popping vitamin pills every two hours, doing this, doing that, and anyway you will die without living.

What are you so afraid of? Live totally today and if you fall dead tomorrow out of exhaustion, it's okay. At least you lived for one day completely, throwing your life out. If you don’t live like this, you will never know life. What are you holding it back for? If you hold it, it won't stay with you; that is the nature of life.

This is not material substance that you can lock and keep. If you lock it, it will die. Please live. Don’t store for future lives. Don’t have more than twenty-one pairs of footwear, okay?