This year is my 10th anniversary running Minute Women — wow does time fly!
Since entering the home care industry, I am always think about death. I provide care for people in the last few months or years of their life.
The death of my mom is the reason I am in home care. If she had not passed away when she did, my life would be significantly different.
All because of death.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not walking around like Charlie Brown with a rain cloud above me, but how can you not consider your own mortality when you are around end-of-life for a living and have had close family members pass away prematurely?
Life In Weeks
There are two types of people when it comes to death:
Those that embrace their mortality and those that avoid thinking about it.
I am fall into the first of the two categories.
I received a gift recently, a poster with hundreds of small outlined squares on it. Each square represents a week of life, as you pass each week, you fill in the outline and a solid square represents a week already lived.
The poster is a visual representation of how much time has passed and how much time you theoretically have left.
I even marked the square when I turn 77 in red as that is close to the average life expectancy in the US (though I hope on making it longer!).
Bucket List
One movie I enjoyed was The Bucket List with Morgan Freeman and Jack Nicklaus, If you haven’t seen it, give it a watch, it’s great.
The plot is two seniors have terminal cancer and are in the same hospital room. Nicklaus plays the man with all the material possessions and Freeman is a blue-collar family man who wishes he had done more in life.
As you can guess by the title, they decide to form a bucket list and travel the world crossing off their objectives.
Haven’t we all wondered what we would do if we found out we had only a year or two left to live?
What would be on our bucket list?
Why wait to accomplish a bucket list when it might be too late?
For me, this poster is a motivator, a daily kick in the ass to make today count, and after seven days you a week that’s worth while, not wasted.
It also is a representation that, at 37, I am in the begging on “middle-age” as the average life span is ~78 years in the US. It is shocking on how 37 years has passed so quickly, and everyone says the older you get the faster it goes.
Life in weeks might not be for you, it might give you a pit in your stomach (as it does for my girlfriend), but the point is to have you think about what is a motivator for you?
What are you going to do to make today count?