Impending death is a strange experience.
About 8 weeks ago my grandmother was told she had just a few more weeks left to live.
She had been experiencing some weird headaches and dizzy spells. She went in to get checked out and that is when they discovered that her body was completely over run with cancer. She was completely beyond treatment at this point.
Needless to say in the past month I have had a lot of conversations and personal ponderings on the end of life… and more importantly how facing death impacts the day to day living of it.
YOLO (you only live once) is a popular phrase used by kids these days. It is often used as an excuse for obnoxious, destructive, and flippant behavior. It is a justification. The power of what this phrase could represent is lost in drunken tirades, binge eating, and wasteful spending.
As I have watched my grandmother embrace her final hours and drift out of this life I have contemplated what it means to REALLY live….
What does it mean to really live… to really seize life.
Does it mean we eat everything we see, buy everything we want, and take that vacation we have always dreamed of? At first glance movies and books like Eat Pray Love seem to suggest that this is the case.
I have come to realize that really living has nothing to do with what we are DOing…. If we are eating the cake at the party, going skydiving, or going on the vacation…
Really living is about how we are BEing in every moment, how present and engaged we are with the experience of life.
Some people believe that having no diet restrictions means they are really living, experiencing, and seizing life… but they couldn’t be more off.
Most of us will not get a timeline for our death. Most of us will slip out of this world with little to no warning. We will die the way that we have lived. We will never know if this hug, this good bye is our last.
So how are we living?
I went LIVE on facebook about this experience. It received an overwhelming response with over 2,800 views and 35 shares in 2 days. View that video here.
Life is precious, brief, and unpredictable.
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