Be Obsessed With Living

<p>There is a morbid theme running through the music of Johnny Cash. His deep, haunting voice is rarely far from a lyric about death or murder or loss or grief. He has songs about <a href='https://genius.com/Johnny-cash-route-no-1-box-144-lyrics'>soldiers killed in Vietnam</a>, songs about <a href='https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qsu5Jeowe6E'>dying cowboys on the streets of Laredo</a>, <a href='https://genius.com/Johnny-cash-i-hung-my-head-lyrics'>about tragic rifle accidents</a>,  songs about salvation and damnation, songs about tragedy and war. Famously, he performed almost his entire career dressed in black—like he was on his way to a funeral. </p><p>So it’s not a stretch to think he might have been a bit preoccupied with the idea of mortality. <a href='https://www.nytimes.com/1994/09/14/arts/new-rebel-for-the-90-s-meet-johnny-cash-62.html'>In an interview with Neil Strauss</a>, Cash explained that this was the wrong way to see it: </p><p>&quot;I am not obsessed with death. I&apos;m obsessed with living. The battle against the dark one and the clinging to the right one is what my life is about. In &apos;88, when I had bypass surgery, I was as close to death as you could get. The doctors were saying they were losing me. I was going, and there was that wonderful light that I was going into. It was awesome, indescribable — beauty and peace, love and joy — and then all of a sudden, there I was again, all in pain and awake. I was so disappointed. But when I realized a day or so later what point I had been to, I started thanking God for life and thinking only of life.”</p><p>There’s a similar tendency to think that the Stoics were obsessed with death, particularly <a href='https://dailystoic.com/marcus-aurelius/?utm_source=convertkit&amp;utm_medium=convertkit&amp;utm_campaign=with-living'>Marcus Aurelius</a> and <a href='https://dailystoic.com/seneca/?utm_source=convertkit&amp;utm_medium=convertkit&amp;utm_campaign=with-living'>Seneca</a>. (Seneca talked about death so much that there is a recently published collect