Monday, June 13, 2011

What if this was the last year of your life?

You have one year to live! What if your doctor told you today that you had only one year to live? It’s not a pleasant thing to think about, but it might be true right now. Who among us can know the day of our death? We all know people who were healthy and active and died unexpectedly. We also know people who smoked, drank and never exercised and died rather less expectedly. Nevertheless, none of us know the exact day we will die. My sister was a smoker and like my father she was diagnosed with cancer. They predicted she would die within six months and she lived nearly four years longer. Neither my father nor sister had a very active or healthy life. Neither of them lived to their expected old age. My father was sixty when he died and my sister was fifty four. They both had ample warning to get their lives in order but both did little or nothing about it.

Perhaps too many of us live with no thought of dying because we “assume” we have a great deal more time to live. Maybe we are young and think we will live forever or maybe we regularly work out and think this will prolong our life. By assuming we will live longer, we put up with a lot of stuff that we would be better off dealing with. We stay in dead end jobs, we ignore things we really want to do, or we put off living until we are retired.

Are you waiting to live your life? If you died today, would you have any regrets? If you thought about the possibility that this proposition was true (that you only had one year to live), would you do anything different? Do you think you would try to get your life in better order? What do you need to do to make this next year the best year of your life?

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