“Day by day remind yourself that you are going to die.”
The repeated theme of being ever-conscious of your own mortality stands out after reading the Desert Fathers and then the Rule of St. Benedict.
We hide death in our culture. It sounds grotesque to “remind yourself day by day that you are going to die.” But doing so could also potentially change how we live for the better. Several week ago, I was driving through a part of town I had never been. In this area, there were many roads constructed to drive through a public cemetery. This cemetery was filled with fresh flowers among the gravestones. It was clearly often visited, and did not strike me as a sad place to be. I thought about things like legacy, how I wanted to live in light of the transitoriness of life, and honoring those who had come before me.
This is part of the wisdom of the early Christian monastic tradition.