I watched a TED talk recently that was amusing and fun and then the speaker put up on the screen the most terrifying graphic I've seen in a long while. It was a white screen filled with boxes. One box equaled one week. In your life if you lived to be 90 years old.
There weren't that many boxes.
If you want to share my fear, you can visit Tim Urban's website and read his blog post about it. Complete with graphics and not just the scary one from his TED talk. He made other, even more terrifying graphics to really hammer the point home.
Before my mom died, my dad said that she told him she'd had a good life. I guess that means that she colored in her life boxes with good things, productive things, things that brought her satisfaction. I want to be able to say the same thing she did when it's my time to go and that means reassessing life, I guess. Making decisions on how I want to color in my boxes.
Even with the fear of wasting life, this isn't an easy thing to do. Gretchen Rubin has a quote that's appropriate here: "The days are long, but the years are short."
It's too easy to think I'll do it tomorrow. I'm already doing this in a way, blogging about it instead of mulling. When I was a teenager, I mulled over life a lot. I read philosophy and I subscribed to Socrates' theory The unexamined life is not worth living. As an adult, with so many different demands on my time, it's harder to do this.
Much harder.
