Will you choose Life before your time runs out?

In December 2024 my father was angry with me. He wanted to move to Canada, and he was frustrated when I explained to him that the sponsorship and immigration process would take at least two years. And then he uttered these words to me: “I don’t have that kind of time. In two years, I will be 70.” That was three months before he died. 

Today would have been his 70th birthday. And I can still hear him say those words: “I don’t have that kind of time. In two years, I will be 70.” And it breaks my heart. 

It breaks my heart for many reasons. First, he never got to celebrate his 70th birthday. He didn’t even celebrate his last birthday before he died. He spent his last birthday hyper focused on what was missing and what he was lacking, and not on what was right in front of him. Second, he didn’t have the time left he thought he had left. Third, time goes by faster than we realize. How has it been almost two years since that conversation? How is his 70th birthday already here? And why does it hurt so much that I don’t get to wish him happy birthday today?

It also breaks my heart because so many of us live as if we won’t die, as if we have time to get to the things that truly matter. We tell ourselves we will get down to the business of living just as soon as we get everything that is bothersome off our plates – you know, once we get through this difficult period with our spouse or children or parents, once we finish that big project at work, or once we find a better job, once the kids move out of the house, or once we make the money we hope to make, or once we find “the one”, or once we lose that weight, or get back into shape… then… then everything will be great, and we will finally be happy, and we will finally get to focus on the things that we truly love.

And yet, this is it. The life you are living right now – with its frustrations and unglamorous parts – this IS your life. This is the time you have been given. And it doesn’t matter if you have 80 years of life or 24 years of life, it’s all so short, and it goes by so quickly. 

One of the participants in THRIVE shared that she doesn’t want to accept that she will never get it all done. I don’t think she is alone. I think that so many of us think that if we just work harder or more efficiently, or we can find a way to work faster, we will get it all done. The truth is though; you won’t. It’s simply not possible, given that you will not live forever. 

Oliver Burkeman says that once we are willing to accept the finitude of our lives and our capacity, we are finally free. Free to choose how and on what we want to spend our finite time, and we can just get on with the business of living. As human beings we will not get to experience full freedom – i.e., the freedom that comes with unlimited time, energy, and capacity. We will only ever get to experience freedom within the constraints of limited time, limited energy, and limited capacity. 

The question is, with so many options in front of us, how do we even choose where and how we want to spend our time? There is no one right answer here, because the answer depends on what matters most to you…

And you might be reading this and immediately know what matters most to you. Or you might be reading this, and not even be sure what really matters to you. Either way, slowing down always serves us. When we know what matters, slowing down helps us to check in with ourselves: Am I living in alignment with what matters most to me? 

And if we don’t know what matters most to us, then I have found that slowing down is the only way to really discover what matters most. We have a hard time accessing our own wisdom when we are moving too fast. 

I have also allowed myself to slow down every time the grief shows up and wants to be here. I let it. And I let it teach me about life, about love, about what truly matters, and about how important it is to “get it” before our own time runs out. 

Six years ago, during the pandemic, I read Michael A. Singer’s book, the The Untethered Soul. The version of me that started reading that book six years ago struggled to make sense of some of what Singer was sharing. The version of me now, has lived it, and doesn’t need to read it in a book. In the penultimate chapter of his book, Singer encourages the reader to contemplate death. Another way of saying it, is to allow Death to be your teacher. Let it teach you the value of life. 

I found this suggested practice aligned with the Stoic practice of negative visualisation which involves imagining what life would be like without the people or things you love to help you appreciate what you have more. We tend to take the people closest to us for granted, and we tend to ignore the simple yet profound things in our life that actually make our lives worth living. So, we tend to be blind to what matters most to us, until we are suddenly forced to live without it…

To be clear, the idea is not to wallow in self-pity or stay stuck in your worst-case scenarios. Spending some time each day in negative visualisation helps you become more present to your life and pay attention to your life as it is unfolding. If practiced correctly; focused on the things you tend to take for granted, it helps you appreciate the good things in your life.

By spending some time thinking about all the simple things in your life that actually make your life beautiful, or by learning to appreciate the people in your life that sometimes annoy you, but whom you know you cannot really live without, you learn to love the things you have in your life, instead of constantly complaining about them, or pining for the things you lack.

Singer provides such a powerful example of what he means. He says that when someone is terminally ill in hospital, they desperately want to leave the hospital and go for a walk outside. Something as simple as taking a walk outside and looking up at the blue skies, has profound meaning for someone who only gets to stare at four stark hospital walls and a blank ceiling all day long. And yet, it’s only once we are confined to a hospital bed that we long to simply take a walk outside and look at the sky with no particular goal or outcome in mind…

During the peak of his illness, my father had one simple request. He wanted apple-flavoured sparkling water. And I got him some every time he asked me for it. And I would watch him savour that water as if it was the best thing he had ever tasted. When you suddenly don’t get to drink water, the taste of water can be magnificent.

And that is what contemplating death is all about. Death makes life precious and beautiful, because if we didn’t face the prospect of dying, we would simply take life for granted. We would fail to appreciate the small things that bring us joy, because we would deem them insignificant. It’s because life is finite and we will all have to face death one day, that life is such a precious commodity. So how might you savour the incredible beauty already present in your life today?