My last two posts were related to the turning of the calendar. I have one final new year's idea before I say goodbye to 2006 forever. My suggestion is simple: Imagine that you have only one year to live, starting now. (If there happens to be a small subset of my audience that actually has only one year or less left to live, I certainly don't intend any disrespect to them.) The best time to do this is new year's day, since it'll be trivially easy to keep track of how much time you have left. I'm not suggesting that you stop wearing your seatbelt or take other risks that someone who truly only had a year to live might logically take. I'm suggesting that you be more aware of the passage of time and your own mortality, and that you take steps right away to achieve anything you really want to achieve, rather than letting such goals recede on the horizon as each day gets frittered away with urgent but unimportant minutiae. For a variety of reasons people tend to live less urgently than they should, and imagining that you have only one year left to live is a good way to awaken from the slumber.
posted by howtolive.org at
10:02 AM
3 Comments:
people dont think about what would happen if they only had on year to live most people dont want to think about it.
By
Anonymous, at 8:42 PM
This is a valid point. My opinion is that most people would benefit from becoming more continuously aware of the brevity of life, but I know that this doesn't apply to everyone and I do understand your opinion. Having said that, human mortality is certainly not a secret and those who read this post but prefer not to think about their impeding doom can simply disregard my recommendation to live more urgently and instead go back to not thinking about death. Your point is even more valid for some of my other posts, which fall into the category of facts which people may not have been fully aware of until they read them here (in such cases it's hard to unring the bell). Some such realizations are not for everybody, and as I describe on the "Read Me First" page, for those who aren't sure how they'll handle such truths, I encourage them to not read my blog.
By
howtolive.org, at 3:05 PM
You would live differently if you knew you had five years to live or ten than if you would only have one year to live.
If you knew that you had only one year to live you might take more chances or waste less time. But also, you might not invest in doing something new because it would not reward you in the long run. Either way, you could be missing out on doing everything you want to do in life, even if the actual time is not enough.
By
Anonymous, at 9:55 AM
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