How do you feel about death?

That's probably not a question you get asked often. But it's a worthy one.

In Buddhist circles, which dominate in South East Asia, Westerners have a reputation for being desperately avoidant of this topic.

I once did a consulting assignment for a very wealthy family. They wanted to avoid family rupture over money once the elderly parents, who'd made that money, died. I was helping them identify a set of family values to help bond them and guide their decision making.

As part of this I took them through a process to imagine they were at the end of their lives, looking back on them, and to assess what deeply mattered to them.

One family member - a woman in her early 30s - objected to the exercise. She found thinking about dying 'uncomfortable' and she refused to do it.

I include a similar process in the self guided tool I've created for assessing and finding direction in life, the Flourish Life Assessment. When I finished creating this, I had a friend of mine road-test it for me. The first thing she found was that the process of imagining the end of her life, stopped her in her tracks. It's the first part of the activity but it was so confronting that she had to pause there for a few days to ease herself into thinking about it, before she could proceed.

I think about death a lot. In fact whenever I have important life decisions to make that are not clear to me, I'll visit my friend death. This friend has a way of cutting through the noise in life, cutting through the messy myriad of competing options and priorities that can be vying for my attention and confusing my inner compass.

One of the reasons it's been a month since my last post is that I've had some life turmoil bubbling up - some important decisions about my future. It's demanded all of my deep processing capacity.

I like to share reflections with you that are current and real rather than churning them out in advance on some mass-produced schedule. The down-side of that is that sometimes life squeezes out my writing.

The other day I felt the need to ground myself. So I sought the experiences that I know do that - chief among them, solitude in nature, and my friend death.

I jumped on my bike and rode to the Botanical Gardens. I lay there on the grass in a quiet spot, looking up at the morphing clouds in the sky. I meditated. And then I rode to the track for my training session. I deliberately chose the route that goes through the cemetery.

I looked at some of the gravestones - the ages of people, the dates that mark the beginning and end of their lives.

This brought to my attention the finite-ness of my time as an alive human. I saw my life as the tiny blip in time that it is. My own personal little window of opportunity to be alive, and to choose how I do that.

I don't believe in an afterlife. I may be wrong, but my assessment of its likelihood renders it highly unlikely. So I live like it doesn't exist.

That leaves this life as pretty darned precious!

When I imagine that end of life scenario, the version that produces the most overwhelming grief for me is where I look back on life and feel great regret. Where I feel I missed the opportunities that were there to live in line with what matters. Where I frittered away my little window of time on distractions from what's important to me, from living intentionally, in line with my values.

The most powerful way I know to prevent this, is to hang out with death. There's no more clear perspective to move me to live with integrity, to bind myself securely to meaningful choices.

It's uncomfortable and yes, confronting. But that stirring out of complacency allows us to shift. It allows a choosing-again for our lives. I have found it's very much worth the discomfort.

The Buddha knew this - it's a very real example of the temporariness of all things and it helps focus us on what matters - our flourishing here and now. Meditating on death is a common Buddhist practice, which is why they think we're a bit odd in our desperate aversion to even thinking about it.

What comes up for you when you contemplate death? Are you willing to do it? Can you use its unsettling effect to orient yourself towards living more congruently with what truly matters to you - to flourish more fully?