Do your moments matter?
I was fortunate in my twenties to get to be a volunteer for hospice as a patient companion. If you are too young to care about the word…hospice means taking care of people who are about to die, maybe in a week, maybe in six months. Hospice workers, in my opinion, are angels on earth helping us to make that transition as beautiful as possible. The training was compelling and shifted my life perspective in many ways.
Try this exercise they did with us in our training.
- Take a piece of paper and draw a line on it.
- Imagine this line is the length of your life.
- Draw a vertical line or mark a point on that horizontal line in some way that shows where you are (age-wise) right now in that life journey.
- Now calculate approximately how long until you die.
I was 22 when I drew mine, and the vertical line I put on the paper was slightly less than 25% of the way on the line. I did a rough calculation at that time and realized I was planning to die at about 86 years old and that I had 64 years to go.
Lessons
Mapping your length of life may sound morbid, especially if you are in your twenties, but it was eye-opening. At that age, I didn’t realize I was operating under the mindset that I would live forever. There is nothing wrong with that mindset. But marking down where I was and how much longer I had helped me realize two big things:
- I was going to die someday. That fact is obvious now, but it wasn’t obvious then and….
- The time before me was countable, so what did I want to do with it?
That experience started a much bigger journey of wanting more meaning in my life. I would be in the middle of some work thing or friend thing or whatever and then flash my mind to my deathbed and try to think about whether or not what I was obsessing about or worried about would matter at that point. Most of the time, the things I was worrying about, like what other people thought of me, wouldn’t matter.
I think life can be a wonderful, meaningful adventure, but sometimes we need to calculate our days left to remember how important it is to make moments matter.