Years ago, I was bedridden with a bad case of depression. I could hardly move, as though moving would quicken the death I was certain would come. Yet death would have been welcomed considering the dark space I was in, if not for my fears that everything I was feeling at that moment would be intensified before death would embrace me into nothingness. The paradox I faced was that I was in so much pain that I was hoping to die, but in order for death to come I’d have to be in still greater pain.

All very morose, to be sure. But every day, millions of people go through the very same thoughts I went through that day. Stuck between the fear of existing and the fear of dying, many people are confined to a dull existence consisting of only passing the time. Even without physical death, they are dying on a spiritual level – struggling to control, fix and manage the scarcity they perceive in life, in a race against time, believing that if they didn’t succeed they’d be diminished to a tiny speck of insignificant, inconsequential thing.