TL;DR Can't I please just enjoy myself now and worry about living purposefully later? In our last post, we talked about one way to live a purposeful life, which requires us to change. In this post, I make the case that if we are serious about this, we must start now (today!) as our time is very, very short.
This post is part of a series of leadership lessons I learned from my father in his last days. Read the first article here.
Let’s talk about death. A heavy subject, but unavoidable. If living purposefully is our goal, death is our ultimate deadline.
Very simply put, people either die suddenly, or they die with age. Even though the former is unexpected, and the latter isn’t, I have never felt as close to both as now.
The unexpected is close
While my father was sick, I obviously read a lot online about tumors, discussed his illness with his physicians, and talked about it with friends and relatives. To my surprise, I realized that even though terminal illnesses correlate with age, they are far more frequent in younger people than I thought.
These abstract percentages got names and faces in the corridors and waiting room of the radiotherapy center we went to. I remember vividly the faces I saw every time the door to the shielded room would open and the previous patient would come out. A tall, athletic man in suits who seems to have had a long treatment journey already. A young, cheerful teen in her twenties who was joking around with the staff and seemed to have embraced her condition. And several times, it would break my heart to see a parent coming out carrying their child, either because the child was too weak to walk out alone – or because all the parent could offer them was this caring and carrying hug.
Add to that the probability of being involved in a fatal accident, crime, etc. and you realize that your life could easily end much earlier than you are acting like.
Yes, probabilities are still definitely low, but who can guarantee they wont be that data point in the statistic?
The expected is… also close!
As surprising as the above thought is, I am even more shaken by the realization that “death with age” is not that far away either.
I am currently 35, half my father’s age when he passed away. Life expectancy for men in Egypt is coincidently 69 as well, so unless I move to Hong Kong or somewhere else where they live longer, I shouldn’t count on a better average – give or take a couple of years depending on lifestyle etc.
As a young tennis fanatic, I used to love playing tennis. 2h on the court and 1h of fitness, 6 days a week was the price I was willing to pay to become a world class champion (those who have seen me play know how ridiculous this is – but that didn’t stop my ambition).
My goal was clear, and I used to find a lot of comfort in my early teens that Boris Becker won Wimbledon when he was 17, Sampras won the US Open at 19, and my absolute favorite, Agassi, was a bit of a late bloomer and won his first grand slam at the age of 22. I did not have much time, but it was still possible to beat them.
Until I turned 17. And then 19. And then 22.
And I slowly realized I was no longer the “youngest adult in the room”.
And now, my stupid body rubs it in my face every so often. If I skip stretching before working out I immediately tear something. If I don’t work out just for a few days I wake up with back pain. And a simple headache triggers examinations by my doctor as to whether I am developing hypertension.
Whaaat?? Isn’t that for old people?
Lesson #2: Act now!
A tsunami of questions and feelings goes through my head. How has time passed by so quickly? And how did I let myself waste so much of it already? Did I really live a purposeful life, or did I just follow the path of least resistance? How many goals had I hoped to achieve? How many are lost causes like the Egyptian Boris Becker dream? And for the remaining ones, why am I acting like I have all the time in the world?
Unfortunately, we often forget how precious our time on this earth is. We move from day to day, getting tangled up in things that are not worth one bit of untangling. Life defining decisions are not made consciously but left to mere chance or others to make them for us. We believe we do not have options, time, or energy, so we drift into busy, but empty lives.
Irrespective of where we are in our lives, the clock is ticking, and our bar keeps filling.
On the one hand, the time that passed was extremely precious, and we wasted a good amount of it. But on the other hand, we are as young as we will ever be.
"The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second-best time is now" Chinese Proverb
5, 10, 35 years from now, what would we have wished we had started today?
Have a spectacular weekend,
/M
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