The 6 Months Left to Live Question

So many of us live our lives as if we have all the time in the world.

We postpone that master project that would allow us to dominate our domain and bring beauty into the world.

We postpone being the kind of people we know and our hearts we wanna be.

We postpone forgiving people who might have hurt us and repairing broken relationships.

We postpone taking travels to Mauritius to swim with the dolphins or going to Buenos Aires or going to the Tate Modern in London or wherever it is.

We postpone living our promise and doing the study and exercising the training that would allow us to live more of our potential.

We postpone having more fun.

We are hustling, grinding, working most of the time to meet our responsibilities and to fulfill the cultural norm of working hard as a badge of honor.

So we postpone watching the sunset or spending a few hours in a garden or reading the great works of literature to some imaginary time in the distance when the busyness will dissolve and we'll have much more free time and everything will be okay and we'll have all this freedom, yet there will never be a better time to be the person and to live the life of your highest ethical ambitions than now.

And what I often do is at this stage of my life, I ask myself a question.

I say, would I do this given that I only have 25 Christmases left? And I don't know how long I'm going to get to live.

It might be much shorter.

It might be much longer.

But roughly, I have about 23, 20, or 25 Christmases left.

And so when there's an adventure I want to take or when there's a project that I ideate, I ask myself, or I might say it to my loved ones, well, you know what? I only have 20 Christmases left.

And that really brings the shortness of life into focus.