A man dies a thousand times a day, in ten thousand ways. Not the body. The man he thought he was. He dies first as a boy, the morning he learns his father cannot fix everything. He dies when the girl looks past him. He dies in the dirt of the playing field, in the silence after the wrong word, in the office where another man is chosen. He dies when the money runs out, and again when it comes in and changes nothing. He dies at his mother’s bedside. He dies in the mirror. He dies at the door of his own house, coming home spent to people who need more than he has left. He goes in anyway. King or ditch digger, it makes no difference. The rich man dies in silk, the poor man in wool, and both are dead before breakfast. This is not misfortune. It is the toll of the road, and every boy who would be a man pays it, knowing or not. We do not regret it. We do not flinch from it. We do not ask that it be otherwise. It never was. It never will be. It is the fate of men. The coward spends his life trying not to die, and so dies every day and learns nothing. The man takes each death standing. He lets it pass through him, and he rises to the work in front of him. In that he finds a peace no one can take, because it rests on nothing that can be taken. He died today. He will die tonight. He keeps his word, carries his load, and holds his post in the World of Man. That is the strength to survive anything. Not the hope of never falling. The certainty of rising. Die well. Die often. Then get up and do to work. — The Knight Monk