Can you smile in your last second?

I've always heard of stories that, in your last living moments your life passes before your eyes, or your kids, or your dreams that you will never get to live and so on. I find it all really nice... BUT what's the importance of you seeing your life, your unborn children, your unmet wife and so on when you know this is it... it's the last thing you'll ever think about?!

I know for a fact that smoking reduces your life expectancy. As a matter of fact so does fast-food, paranoia, depression and about a billion of other things. Are you going to think in your last seconds that you would have had eleven more minutes of life if you hadn't lit up your last cigarette???

I heard a lot of people (old ones) that are happy to have lived their lives to an extent that they can tell their grandchildren bed-stories at night. Stuff like: "Ohhh!... when I was almost your age..." Will that make them smile when they meet their fate?

I know for a fact that I have lived a lot of things that I wouldn't dare tell my grandkids about (if I ever get the chance, that is). One of them loiters still in my mind: I was chit-chatting with one of my very-dear friends the other day, telling him a story about me, when he said: "If I were you girlfriend I would kill you, but as I am your friend I will say nothing at all!" I found it really amusing at the time.

Last weekend, while I was back home, in Galati, I read some of my high-school writings that have passed through the years. One was an essay about the purpose of life, the ultimate happiness; and it started with a very nice quote from Baruch Spinoza: "We live our lives under the influence of hope and fear" HOPE and FEAR... that's it... nothing more. It made me think for the past days about that. I like this quote very much and I sense that it is similar with another of my personal favorites: "Life is all about smiles and cries... and how you control them"
Today I abandoned thinking, in a rather philosophical manner, about life - in general - and its goal, purpose, ultimate ending (whatever you want to call it) and started thinking, in a more pragmatic way, about my life. Will I have the guts, the courage, the inner strength (and so on) to smile when my time is due???

I now know the answer: NO. If my time is to be due right now, I will definitely NOT smile... But I found this exercise of thinking very useful for I know now that most of the things that I will set up to do from now on will only help me to get there: to smiling when they set me on fire. And why the fuck not?! I AM, however, smiling most of the time, right? I'm sure that everybody that knows me would state that, if they were to sum up, they saw me smiling for more seconds than not.

With this new boost of energy, I head for what is my destiny: to smile on my deathbed.


Food for thought: How is it possible for one man to worry about the happiness of a billion others, while a billion other men don't care/worry about THEIR OWN happiness?