Brevity.
Life, by definition, ends.
I know, I know, that’s a bit startling and definitely not something you want to be reminded of first thing on a Wednesday. Sorry about that. But there it is.
The thing about this undeniably irritating fact is that we treat it like it’s an insult. How dare life be so brutally short!? How can I possibly be halfway through it (if I’m lucky!) I just started to figure things out!
We feel robbed.
But we were not guaranteed even the time we’ve already had. We all know people who got less time than us. So perhaps nothing has actually been stolen. And most of us, after receiving a rude email like this one, consider our brevity….um..briefly (oh the irony), and then we go back to what we were doing, almost ensuring that five years from now, when someone brings up the same alarming fact, we will still feel robbed.
What if we embraced our tiny amount of time instead? What if we used it as an excuse to get on with things?
I don’t mean that we should cram a bunch more activities in; I mean the opposite in fact. What if we focused exclusively on the few very most important things and stopped pushing them aside because we ‘have plenty of time to get to that’. The downside AND the opportunity of committing only to the tiny handful of important things, is that it makes us ditch the things that are not important. Which turns out to be practically everything.
In the next 15 years, you will have 5,479 days (four leap years! Yay!) That is an absurdly meager number of days of course. Imagine being 15 years older than you are now. What do you want to do before you get to that age?
Get a degree? Start a business? Travel to Iceland? Change careers? Become a decent pianist? Move to Wyoming? Take a pizza class in Napoli? Live in a van down by the river? Have great abs? Drive a Tesla? Hike El Camino? Swim with dolphins?
And not just what do you want to do, but what do you want to contribute? How do you want to feel? What do you want to learn? What do you want to have?
Who do you want to be?
We literally cannot do it all. We can’t be everything. We can’t be a musician and a chef and a kindergarten teacher and a fighter pilot and a poet and horse breeder and a novelist and a blackjack dealer and a zookeeper. We might be able to combine a few of those things, but the important part - and this is a plus, not a minus - is that if we want to be any of those things, we have to choose.
If we embrace the very real limitation of years, and allow ourselves to commit only to a few really critical things, the truth is that we have plenty of time and opportunity to do them.
In 15 years, I really can save enough to go to Naples and learn how to make pizza, if I stop taking trips that are not really important to me. Fifteen years is plenty of time to write and publish a novel if I stop my current job at a reasonable hour in the evening and choose to write every day. Even five years could be enough for those things. But most of us never get started.1
Maybe it’s time to start writing down what the next 5,479 days could look like for you?
And then choose.
Then make a plan.
Then begin step one.
It’s the only way our next chapters get written the way we want.
Thanks to Lisa and David for the inspiration for this post over coffee on their patio! Well, what do you talk about over morning coffee?!
This truly hits home and makes you think… thank you! Such great inspiration! ❤️
Dang. That list! I gotta go think.....