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Will to Live

3 min readMay 10, 2025

Daily Meditation 1,157–5/10/2025

Even if starving, wounded, or dying, animals never really give up on trying to LIVE.

Today’s DM is (once again) about a touchy topic — suicide.

I very recently was over at a friend’s house. They have a nice, heated pool (although, in the far north, it better be heated) and a wonderful property.

Well, they lamented to me how they’d found a poor, drowned squirrel in the pool that morning. As someone who has fed and loved squirrels (and birds and rabbits and deer and…) for many, many years, that kind of broke my heart.
The thought of a small creature, unknowingly, falling into a giant pit of water like this, struggling and straining for hours to stay above water, muscles aching, mind racing, lungs and throat burning with chlorinated water…

And through my life, I’ve attempted to nurse myriad creatures who were suffering — and have had to put down my fair share of animals without any hope of surviving. And I’ve written about it. I had that one wild rabbit who loved me dearly — he’d come see me every morning for a treat, he trusted me. Well…his back half got crushed under a car. He dragged himself into my yard, as if he knew. I had to do my duty. It was like he understood I would do the most unpleasant thing, but the necessary thing, which would remove his agony.
Then there have been incidents with freshly hit deer by cars, as well, including one flailing with a broken neck…

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Lucas A. Davidson
Lucas A. Davidson

Written by Lucas A. Davidson

Daily philosophical meditations on Eudaimonia. These are distillations from the forthcoming book on the topic. Comments or jobs: lucas@multistatewide.com

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