How Would You Live Your Life?

I am an avid reader, I always have a book on the go. I am endlessly interested in books on the journey of the human spirit. I recently finished reading Neil Peart’s book (drummer from Rush) called, ‘Ghost Rider: Travels on the Healing Road’. This book of his personal journey (I don’t want to spoil it if you happen to pick it up) got me thinking in new ways, as all books do.

That is the beauty of reading. After you put the book down you have this evolution of the mind. All the knowledge you have taken in page by page, is now within your soul and spirit. Forever changed. Sometimes on a grand level and sometimes just slight. Alas, never the same.

From the ideas that began to take form in my mind, during the journey of Neil Peart’s beautifully written book of vulnerability. That age old question popped in my mind, you know the one that is somewhat morbid, but gets us thinking about our life. “What would you do if you were going to die in a year?”

 This question in my mind started to change and grow into…

 “What would you do if someone told you that you only had a year to LIVE!” Flipping the question to LIFE, not death.

 How often do we sit with our friends, and discuss all the things we would do. With the following words attached to our sentence, “If only ‘this’, and “if only ‘that’. Why is it that we sometimes think that we would change things if this question really did enter into our lives?

 What if, as of today, you truly gave up something that is no longer serving you, rather than waiting for the question to roll around in your life? Take a moment and think of the one thought that takes up so much mental space in your mind, day in and day out. Is it the thoughts of your body, how it looks, if it’s good enough, etc. (this is just one example, as this question could apply to whatever you need it to be).

 Imagine if this was the day that you decided that your body is perfect just as it is and you are going to love it every day. That today you will let go of worrying about what you ate and drank but started caring for your body. To enjoy food and drink in moderation, so to breathe each breath of this life with gratitude for the gift that it is!

 Because technically if you only had one year to LIVE, you would change your whole mindset and realize that worrying is redundant. To realize that the mental space it took up (whatever it is that you may stress or worry about) no longer has a place, because there is so much LIVING to do.

What would you let go of, what would you stop spending time thinking about, talking about, watching on TV, worrying about, gossiping about, habitually doing every day?

Now what would you do with that year? How would you LIVE?

Would you get your motorcycle license?

Would you go on a meditation / yoga retreat?

Would you take a pottery class?

Would you learn how to play the drums?

Would you plant a garden?

Would you take a yoga class?

Would you start exercising mindfully?

Would you learn a new language?

Would you sit quietly every day and read?

Would you go for a walk every day?

Would you turn the TV off and listen to your favorite music?

Would you take a dance class?

Would you go on a trip all by yourself and discover a new country you always wanted to see?

Would you open yourself up to fall in love?

Would you talk to a stranger?

Would you look for the good rather than put someone else down, and each time you caught yourself doing it, smile quietly to yourself, because you realized in that moment that the old you is long gone, or almost gone, and the new you is mindful and emerging?

Would you listen rather than always talking?

Would you be kind instead of right?

Would you lay beside your dog every day and just pet him / her?

Would you write a book?

Would you tell that someone who changed your life forever, how much they touched your soul?

Who would you forgive?

Would you forgive yourself?

Would you go into therapy to learn to forgive?

Would you let go of an old story that you have told way too many times to count?

Would you wave to your neighbour rather than look away?

 You see, it doesn’t have to take some life altering moment to make us sit up and stop our behaviours (however sometimes it does because we aren’t listening to our own soul – and that is the only way to ‘wake us up’;). It doesn’t have to wait until New Year’s Eve. It can be this very moment. The moment you decide.

What would you do if you had one year to LIVE? And then another year? And then another? 

How do you want to spend your life?