What would you do on the last day of your life?

A good friend of mine and I were chatting last night about an interesting topic.  She asked me what I would do if I had only one day left to live. 

Now that’s an interesting question.  It made me think really hard about what I considered important in my life, and about everything that I stood for.  My (somewhat) humorous response was to say that I would spend part of that time calling my family and telling them all how much I loved them, and then spending the rest of the day eating all the great food I had been denying myself throughout life, in the vain hope that I would be healthy and fit. 🙂  I would eat everything I’d ever wanted to eat… all the fat included, and I’d top it off with every sinful ice cream combination I could think of. 🙂

After thinking about it for a bit more time, however, I realized that my response was a reflection of how I’d been living my life… and the answer wasn’t entirely heartening, either.  If I take those two, off-the-cuff options, and analyze them further, what I find is startling.  You see, when you’re asked a question like that, the most obvious reaction would be to think of things you have NOT been doing… things you have either failed/neglected to do… or things you have been forced by circumstance not to do.  I mean, if you’ve been a tollboth collector all your life, and you’re asked a question like that, the LAST response you’d expect is to say, "Well, I’ll just sit in my booth and keep collecting coins from passing motorists…"  Instead, you’ll be doing all the things you’d ever dreamed of doing.  You’d be calling all the people you HAVEN’T been calling.  You’ll be spending your last 24 hours pretty much making up for the previous lifetime of mistakes and regrets. 

And this is what my response taught me: that I don’t contact my family enough…that I don’t tell them I love them enough… and that I am in a constant struggle with myself over how much I weigh, so much so that I’m in an everyday state of denial and repression.  How depressing is that? 

If I’m going to extrapolate further, my response showed me that part of what is missing in my life is the ability to make all my friends and family know just how much I value them, just how important they are to me.  I don’t think I’ve done enough to tell all the people I love just how much they mean to me.  If I had only 24 hours to live, I doubt I would have enough time to call each and every one of the people I need to call… and the thought cuts right through me.  I haven’t done enough to thank people and let them know they are special.  Imagine what would happen if, instead of a day, I had no time.  If I died in a plane crash today, there would be people I truly and deeply care about who would never know how much they’ve touched my life. 

Regarding my "food" portion of the response, I can gather that there are many things in my life that could genuinely give me pleasure, and make me happy, yet I constantly deny myself these things because I feel I have to live up to a certain ideal of who I should be, either in terms of looks, social status, financial standing, etc.   I mean, think about it… if the world truly didn’t care about how we looked, or what we did, or how we lived our lives… would we be doing what we’re doing?  Would every supermodel still be thin?  Would every guy or girl really be as obsessed with fitness and going to the gym?  Would we care about how much our jobs paid us, or even about what path to take?  I have a friend who wants to be a ballerina, but is taking mechanical engineering because that’s what her parents want for her.  I wonder, if she had the same choice, if she would spend a single second of her last day with a wrench in her hand.  My guess is that she would be, rightly, dancing each moment she had left.  That’s as it should be.  And yet, by virtue of social and or internal pressures, we often choose the path we are not happy with… because we feel it is what the world would think is right.

It’s a trite thing to say that we should tell people we love them and that we should always be true to ourselves.  How many of us actually live our lives this way?  I know I don’t, and I’m not proud of it.  My only hope is that I won’t have to wait till my last 24 hours for me to shape my life into what I want it to be.  After all, not all of us are as fortunate to know when we are going to die.  As far as I’m concerned, if the life I’m leading is NOT the life I would be proud of, then it’s not really living, is it?  My 24 hours may already have arrived.  I may already have died, and not even noticed it.