It often takes approach of death to wake us from a dead-end life

Most people don’t begin to live until they know they’re going to die.

In 1952, Japanese director Akira Kurosawa explored that uncomfortable truth in his film “Ikiru,” which translates “to live.” The film opens with a quiet, devastating fact: Kanji Watanabe is dying. We know it before he does.

Watanabe has spent decades as a bureaucrat — a section chief in a city office — stamping papers, following procedure, preserving order. His wife is dead. He has devoted his life to saving money and providing for his son. He has done what was expected. He has been respectable. Responsible. Safe.

He has also been spiritually absent from his own life.

When he learns he has cancer and has only months to live, he feels hollow. The routines that once filled his days now feel meaningless. He first tries distraction and pleasure. That fails. Then, almost accidentally, he discovers something different: purpose. He throws himself into one small but meaningful public project and finds, at last, a sense of peace.

In the final image we see of him, he sits alone on a swing in the snow, softly singing a song from his youth about how brief life is. It is one of the most haunting scenes ever filmed — not because of tragedy, but because of clarity. He has finally awakened.

This isn’t meant to be a full analysis of the film. I’m interested in something more unsettling: why most of us live like Watanabe long before his diagnosis.

Why are we so slow to recognize what matters?

Why do we postpone the conversations we need to have, the risks we need to take, the love we need to offer, the work that would give us meaning?

We tell ourselves we have time. We can change tomorrow. We can start next month. We can pursue what matters after we get through this busy season.

But no matter how long you’ve already lived, your clock is ticking.

At the end of every year, I hear people declare that the past year was terrible but that the new one will be different. I rarely argue, but I always wonder what makes them think turning a calendar page will change the habits, fears and assumptions that shaped the last one.

If you keep thinking the same thoughts and making the same decisions, the next year will look remarkably like the last. And then the years accumulate. You wake up one day with stability, reputation, maybe even comfort — and a quiet sense that you were never fully present in your own life.

The tragedy is not that life is short.

The tragedy is that we spend so much of it half-awake.

We drift into routines. We numb ourselves with distractions. We convince ourselves that security is the same thing as meaning. We hesitate to act because clarity would require courage.

It often takes the approach of death to strip away those illusions.

Most of us will not receive a clear diagnosis and a countdown clock. We will not be told that we have five months left to decide who we want to be. We simply move forward, assuming we can always adjust later.

But later has a way of disappearing.

You decide what your life will be. I decide what mine will be. No calendar, no boss, no culture can make that decision for us. If we are dissatisfied with the direction of our lives, the responsibility does not belong to fate or politics or circumstances. It belongs to us.

Watanabe found meaning in his final months because he was forced to confront reality. He finally saw that time is finite and that respectability is not the same thing as life.

Whether we have six months or 60 years remaining, the truth is the same: life is brief.

We can continue existing as we have — efficient, distracted, respectable and numb.

Or we can wake up before we are forced to.

Most people never do.

You still can.