How have you lived?
Today, I had a lunch with an old friend. We had an interesting conversation, and we touched on how a colleague of hers turned health conscious and became a vegan. She also paid to go on health camps and detoxifying exercises. Her supervisor was a bit stumped on her willingness to pay good money for such activities. His comment was “Everybody dies eventually.”
That got me thinking. It is a fact that everybody dies eventually. The difference is, how did you live?
Did you live just like everyone else, so that your dying was nothing, well, spectacular? Just another person that passed on? A shadow that slide across a dark alley? The candle that never burned bright enough to light the room?
Will you live a boring life, or did you do something interesting? Did you live just to earn today’s meal, or did you do something that you’re passionate about? Did you live a life with integrity, honesty, honor, joy, happiness, care and love? Or did you lived like the walking dead?
In the end, the difference is in the living. You would have lived so that no one would want you to die. Tall order? How about, you would have lived, so that someone remembered that you died?
Hmm… most readers to this blog entry might think that I’m writing about someone they know. I would like to clarify that is not so. My old friend is someone who doesn’t read my blog and not acquainted to the people who reads this blog. This old friend is an ex-colleague of an old-old-old-old company that I used to work in. Yes, that makes me very old too.
I’d like to die famous, having made a huge contribution, etc.
But I will be satisfied if I can master being the author of my experience of my life.
To clarify: I expend a lot of energy modifying my circumstances to improve my experience of my life. Nothing wrong with that–except that’s the minimum. Everyone does that.
The goal is to author my experience of my life–regardless of circumstances.