Adventures in My Mind
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Oct 16, 2007
Living As if There Was One Day Left
If so, what would you do?
I don't really know what I would do, but I'm sure it wouldn't be much. Seriously. Not much at all. I know that we hear all sorts of self-help gurus and life trainers and whomever tell you that each day should be treated as if it was your last - that each moment should shine with its own glory and dignity so that your (theoretical) last day would serve as your personal testament to the sublimity of human experience.
Write that book. Climb that mountain. Take that dream vacation. Grab the hot chick down the hall and ... well, you get my point. Just do it. Live! Live! Live!
While I respect and often practice the Buddhist concept of living in the moment, I respectfully disagree with the philosophy of going for the gusto in the waning moments of one's life.
When I think of what I would do, I think of simplicity. I think of small moments that often get overlooked in the day-to-day grind of living, working, providing, and surviving. I think of the quiet moments: small touches and smiles from the woman I love, sitting at the foot of my children's beds and watching them sleep, the aroma of a home-cooked meal wafting through the house, a song in my heart, and a bounce in my step.
These seem more important to me than spending my last hours in pursuit of something other than what had been given me. A counting of one's blessings you might say.
As a writer, I appreciate Asimov's quip: "If I only had a few hours to live, I'd type faster." But I'm not sure I'd spend my time doing that either. All I would do is try to cram whatever I was writing with all the things in the above paragraph. I would be sitting in a room alone describing the things that I cherish while the hours slipped away and set me farther away from all of those things.
Why not just go for a walk and say those wonderful things and forget about writing them down. Let those who would grieve me decide what is and isn't important about me and my thoughts. Let the living be a testament to the dead and not try to write my own epitaph for them.
Yes. Life in my last days, assuming I know that I am indeed living them, would be a much simpler affair than we've been coached to have. The time for living a fulfilled life is not when there are countable moments left, but much sooner than that. If you've waited that long to do something inspiring or worthy of pride, then playing catch up will be of little use.
Maybe I'm closer to the idea of living in the moment than I thought. I believe that chasing after goals instead of recognizing and celebrating what had been there all along says more about how you wish to be remembered than about how you actually lived your life.
It may be better to say that we should live each moment as if it were the most important, because it is. There truly is no tomorrow or yesterday. We only have today and more precisely this very moment to be the best we can be and do all the things that we wish to do.
I know this because this morning, my three year old daughter wisely told me that "after tomorrow it will be today". I said, "You're absolutely right, sweetie, absolutely."
1 Comments | Link to this post posted by Teddy 10:42 PM
