If you knew that you only had one week to live, what would you do? Would you give attention to the chatter in your mind rehashing your game plan for an event that might or might not happen in the future? Would you lay awake at night plotting a verbal counter-attack on a family member who insulted you four years ago? Would you continue to go to work everyday feeling angry and jealous that you didn’t get a promotion? Would you berate yourself for eating a fattening food or ruminate about why your partner left you?
Michael Singer asks questions like these in his book “The Untethered Soul”. He says that knowing that life on earth is finite makes us look more carefully at how we choose to live and encourages us to explore and modify it. From that perspective death helps us to live. Many people at the end of their lives wish that they had just a little more time to live authentically and with meaning.
If we are completely engaged in each event and experience it fully at the time then we will have less regrets. It could mean going to a concert and feeling the violin strings vibrate in our hearts, smelling pine needles freshly crunched beneath our feet, loving wholeheartedly and compassionately without an exit strategy or consciously releasing whatever holds us down. Michael says that we need to let things pass through us without getting stuck. Let everything pass through. There will be a time later to examine them in a healthy way.
I have found myself thinking about this concept ever since I read it a week ago. I hear a resounding NO! or YES! when I ask myself if I would be doing this if I knew that I had one week to live. It has helped me to approach my decisions with more clarity and purpose. I thought that it would feel morbid, but it doesn’t.
I found these thoughts inspiring. How about you? Do they resonate with you? I loved hearing your thoughts about remembering!
