The map of days.

It’s a hell of a thing, knowing your skin wants to kill you. Run a thousand miles, and the killer isn’t just with you at the end. He’s all over you.

He came at me again this week.

My third melanoma diagnosis in five years.

It’s cool, don’t worry. Twice now, this motherfucker tried to kill me, and both times it was me who walked away and him who ended up floating in a tiny little jar.

You come at the King, you better not miss.

It does give a man pause for thought, though. Useful thoughts, too. Not, “Wish I’d a worn hat more.” There’s nothing useful in regret unless it’s recognition.

No, my third go around, I’ve spent pondering the uses of mortality. The last time I entertained conjecture of the end, lying in a hospital bed with a bunch of drainage tubes punched through my ribcage, waiting on a surgeon to tell me I had lung cancer, I took the opportunity to contemplate some lessons I’d been a long time ignoring. Or, if I’m being honest, denying.

I’m a lot stronger, fitter and healthier than I was before I went into that hospital because one of those lessons was that although the tiny point of sentience around which the entire universe had organised itself and always would, the irreducible me, felt like he was still 21 years old, the morbidly obese and rapidly disintegrating actual me was not. And in the delta between the imagined and the actual, a reckoning had come due.

I got out of that hospital, and with help from family and friends, I contended with that reckoning. I started lifting weights and hit my protein goals. I walked my dogs each day. I walked them right past the pastry shop and did not stop. Gradually, slowly, my body fat percentage fell from the mid-thirties to the mid-teens.

Good for me. Huzzah for JB Actual.

Had it all figured out, right?

Yeah, nah, allow me to sit back with the quiet smile of a man who knows better because he knows what he does not know.

There is no figuring it all out.

That’s a work in progress and it progresses at its own good pace while there’s still breath in the lungs.

That’s the point of mortality I’ve been musing on this week. Samuel Johnson was wrong about that. It doesn’t so much concentrate the mind as free it from the trivial particulars of everyday life and the infinite scroll of your personal timeline.

Without the hard and clarifying lens of mortality, it's easy to get lost in our bullshit. That endless scroll will fill the sky if we let it run forever.

The trivial will naturally distract us from the profound and elemental, but it’ll also take a hell of a toll on the simply important. We float through most days unconnected to the things that should be most important to us, drawn instead like moths to the annihilating flame of the insignificant.

Mortality, the undeniable, unavoidable truth of your mortality, can serve to snuff out that hot, bright and utterly meaningless flame for you – if you let it. Not all the time, of course. That would be unbearable.

But as we drift across the map of our days, moving towards the darkness at the edge, it can help every now and then to look up and remind ourselves that the darkness is always there and always waiting, and we should enjoy the warm light of day while it remains ours to enjoy.

Mortality frees us from illusion, from the bonfire of inanity, and it challenges us to find substance in the face of impermanence.

So promise me now that you’ll do something today, even if it’s just one small thing, that helps you cherish these moments you have. Don’t go wild. Don’t commit to always being mindful of the heartbreaking beauty of resplendent existence. That’s not a real thing.

But I’m posting early to give you a minute or two, sometime today, to find something or just to think of something that makes you glad you were here. Because one day you won’t be.

Oh, and go get your skin checked.

As for me? Don’t worry about me. I’ll be fine.

You come at the King and, well, you know the rest.