Life and Death Are Not Opposites (They're Partners)

I used to think the goal was to live as long as possible and avoid death as long as possible. That sounds like common sense. But Alan Watts, writing in 1940, argued that this way of thinking is actually the root of a lot of suffering.

His argument is that life and death are not opposites. They are partners. Not opponents. Complementaries. And treating them as enemies is like expecting a mountain to have only one slope, the one that goes up.

The Melody Metaphor

Watts says that life and death are not in conflict. They are the two essential factors of a greater life, just as melody is produced by the sounding and silencing of individual notes. You cannot have a melody without the rests. You cannot have a song without the silence between the notes.

This isn’t just poetry. It’s biology. Life feeds on death. The movement of life is only possible because of the continuous birth and death of cells. Nourishment gets absorbed and waste gets discarded. The waste becomes fertile soil for new life. Vitality is a cycle whose completion requires both upward movement and downward movement.

Light cannot manifest without the whole motion of the light wave from start to finish. If you divided those waves into half or quarter waves, the light would disappear. The same applies to biology. Male and female are opposite yet complementary sexes. Beings are divided in this way to reproduce themselves. The meaning of man and woman is the child without which there would be no point in having two sexes at all. They are the two legs upon which our life stands, and when one is cut away the whole collapses.

I think about this whenever I see people trying to eliminate one side of experience. They want pleasure without pain, success without failure, love without grief. But you cannot have one without the other. They are the same system.

The Stoic Agreement

This is not a new idea. The Stoics said something similar. In the first part of our series on Stoic wisdom, we talked about accepting what is outside your control. Death is the ultimate example. You cannot control it. You can delay it. You can reduce unnecessary risk. But you cannot escape it.

The Stoic move is not to despair about this. It is to use it. When you accept that everything is temporary, you stop wasting time on trivial worries. You start showing up for the people you love. You stop postponing the things that matter. Impermanence is not a bug in the system. It is the system.

The worst-case scenario technique is a practical way to work with this. You imagine losing the things you value, not to make yourself anxious, but to prepare yourself. When you have already faced the loss in your mind, you are less shaken if it actually happens. And paradoxically, you often appreciate what you have more deeply.

Why We Resist This Truth

If accepting life and death as partners is so freeing, why do so few people do it?

Watts says it is because we have a longing in our hearts for eternity and victory over death. That longing is misdirected. In life as we know it, we ourselves are one of those opposites. We are apparently set against something over which we can never triumph. The foundation of our life is the opposition between ourselves and the universe, between that which is “I” and that which is not “I.”

This opposition is complementary rather than truly opposed. The self cannot exist without the universe. The universe cannot exist without the multitude of selves. But from the individual point of view, the process feels wasteful and callous. Nature seems astonishingly indifferent to individual lives. And so we rebel.

We want the mountain to have only the upward slope. We want life without death. But to be a mountain, it must go up and down. To be alive, it must include the possibility of not being alive.

Living With the Whole

Watts writes that those who attempt to destroy the wholeness carry, as it were, corpses in their thoughts that corrupt and poison their souls. In the life to which they cling in horror of death, the pleasure in fear of pain, the wealth in fear of poverty, and the youth in fear of age, they hold only to the world’s dismembered limbs.

I do not think he is saying that wanting to live is wrong. He is saying that wanting to live forever, at the cost of denying the reality of death, is what makes life feel thin. When you accept that death is part of the deal, you stop trying to freeze life in place. You stop clutching. And strangely, life gets richer, not poorer.

The Stoics understood this. Marcus Aurelius compared time to a violent river. Events appear for a moment, then the current sweeps them away. To cling to any of it is to fight against the nature of existence itself. But when you stop clinging, the present moment becomes richer. You know it will not come again. So you pay attention.

Practical Steps

Here is how I try to practice this.

First, remind myself that everything is borrowed. My health. My relationships. This moment. I do not own them. I get to use them for a while. That perspective makes me more grateful and less anxious about losing them.

Second, stop treating death as a failure. It isn’t a failure. It’s a completion. The Hindu view Watts describes is that the meaning is in the whole, not in any single part. Your life is a note in a melody. The melody does not end badly because one note stops sounding. It ends because the piece is finished.

Third, notice when I am fragmenting experience. When I want the pleasure without the pain, or the success without the failure, I remind myself that I am trying to have the melody without the rests. It does not work that way.

FAQ

Does this mean I should not try to stay healthy or safe? No. Original fear is valuable. It keeps you alive. The point is not to be reckless. The point is not to add the fear of fear on top of your natural self-preservation. You can take reasonable care of yourself without making your identity depend on never getting sick or never dying.

How do I accept death without becoming depressed? Accepting death does not mean thinking about it constantly. It means letting the awareness inform your choices. When you know your time is limited, you stop wasting it on things that do not matter. That isn’t depression. It’s clarity.

Is there a spiritual practice that helps with this? Many traditions work with impermanence directly. Buddhism has meditation on death. Stoicism has negative visualization. The common thread is not morbidity. It is familiarity. When you make friends with the reality of death, it loses its power to surprise and terrorize you.

What if I am grieving a loss? Grief is the price of connection. Watts would say that the grief is proof that the relationship was real. Do not try to bypass it. The people who try to avoid grief are the same ones who try to avoid pain, and they end up with shallow lives. Feel it. Let it move through you. Then keep going.

Life and death are not enemies. They are the two legs upon which life stands.