What will you wish you had done with your life while on your deathbed? Of course, that sounds like a morbid thought, but consider it for a moment. While lying there, after hopefully a long life, what will you look back on with fondness? With regret? With longing?
And here’s a most important question: What will you look back on which seemed like a huge deal at the time, but was really not very much at all? To what do you give too much importance now that will mean virtually nothing in the final moments of your life?
Think about the dramas around you. Some of which you may even be perpetuating yourself. Think of the grudges you hold. Think of your enemies. On your deathbed, will you wish you had reconciled? Will the slights and injuries you sustained be worth it in the end?
We have so little time on this earth. So little time to make amends. So little time to do the things we always dreamed of doing. So little time to rebuild the bridges we have burned. Make the most of what you have. It is beyond precious.
What would you wish people to say about you? What would you wish for your obituary? Do that. Do it on purpose, just so that it can be said of you. Imagine someone saying, “The first 40 years of her life were a challenge, but then something woke her up and the final 60 years were truly amazing.” Assuming that we hover around our own funerals in spirit form (which I very much hope to be true) what words would you like to hear said?
Twenty years ago I was gravely ill. Some of the doctors didn’t expect me to survive. I didn’t agree with them, and thankfully they were wrong, but it flipped a switch in me nonetheless. I started to feel differently about my life. I didn’t make a conscious choice to be different or live more purposefully. It just happened naturally.
I always assumed that when people have a serious health event or a near death experience that they come out of it with a new lease on life which they consciously adopt. We’ve all heard the stories many times that events like this will dramatically change a life. But I consciously adopted nothing. I was too busy recovering to be formatting a new mandate for living.
The change was subtle at first. I suddenly no longer had a desire to live in the big and bustling cities in which I had been living for seven years. Without warning I surprisingly desired to return back to my hometown of Fitchburg. It’s not surprising in the sense that I didn’t consider it to be a wonderful place. In fact, I had always spoken of my hometown with great fondness in my world travels. But I had never imagined that going back there would be my path. Suddenly it seemed clearer than ever that it was what I must do.
The leap of faith I made was by agreeing to it. As a professional actor at the time I couldn’t imagine a reasonable career path for me existing back home. But suddenly I wasn’t afraid of that possibility anymore, contrary to what all of my professional friends advised me. I somehow knew that the best thing for my career, whatever I chose it to be, was in returning to my roots.
This appears to be the part which was important: I accepted what my gut was trying to tell me. I realized that in the back of my mind the components of a career which would be truly fulfilling for me were already germinating and maturing inside me, long before I ever became ill. Why hadn’t I listened to them before?
Why aren’t you listening to them now? Or are you? Have you walked across hot coals, either figuratively or literally, and on the other side perhaps didn’t feel one bit different, yet nothing was the same any longer? Must it always take something so life-altering as this to jar loose the small and quiet recognitions we have inside ourselves? Must be that way? Or could we do it on purpose?
On my deathbed, may it be many, many years from now, I will not regret my choice. I will be thankful I listened to the increasingly insistent voice within me saying: “Go home, young man.”
Whether in your mind or on paper or in some electronic file in the cloud, write a eulogy for yourself. Talk about yourself in glowing terms and mean it. Notice about yourself all the things which make people love you. Notice about yourself all the things which inspire others. And then notice the gaps in that narrative. Fill them on purpose. Better yet, fill them with purpose.
You are capable of more than you believe. You have courage within you no tragic event can alter. Don’t wait to skirt the edges of death to discover life. Because it already belongs to you right now.
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