Last Call
It is closing time, the bar tender calls out asking if anyone wants another drink. The conductor blows his whistle one last time before the doors close and the train sets on its way. Last call....then we depart this planet. An entire life lived ends with a last call. All one's hopes and dreams completed or not is reduced to rubble at this last moment. I have often wondered how does one live their life knowing that they have only 3 months to live, and moreover how does that change if you did only have 3 months to live yet you were unaware of it. This was recently experienced by me when a close family member passed after having suffered for little over 3 months with a terminal disease. Our ends are already known, just not by us, but what if they were? Would I radically change my thinking about how I treated friends, family, coworkers or strangers? Would I use my time more wisely to enjoy every moment by spending time with those I cared about or spend more time doing the hobbies that give me most fun? Would I get religion in a hurry? These questions are not designed to make me try to hurry up and do everything before my last call, but moreover are posed in an effort to improve the quality of the living that I am doing at this very moment, in other words right NOW. So that I do not regret my life, yet celebrate it fully at its final moments, these questions must be answered.
Letting go of the past troubles and worries about the future is an extremely necessary step in order to allow the present moment to unfold. The answer lies in just being and not hoping to be, type of mentality. Once you have written down your own personal cardinal questions, and you start the answering process, what you are really doing is reverse engineering your life. The answers are what you are truly desiring and it is your illogical mind that prevents you from hearing them with questions of its own. Such as what will achieve you if you just do your hobbies? who is going to pay bills? what will people say with your liberating course of action? Who put you up to this foolish endevor? And the list goes on. Except the difference is that these questions will constantly keep coming up to thwart you from your true purpose. It was said by Donald Trump " life is what you do while you wait to die." I would agree with this statement except that I would say " dying is what we are doing while we wait to live." The natural order of things is to decay and die. Making a life full is an achievement in itself. A full life is not obtained by necessarily just doing numerous things, it is obtained by doing things to be happy.
Here are my answers. Love, peace, compassion are all qualities that I endevor to envibe and treat everyone to this standard. I do and I will try to utilize every moment given to me to spend it with everyone I love, and since I chose to love everyone, my life is continuously being spent within this framework towards all that I meet. I am doing all the hobbies that I enjoy and find fun to do, as long as I am happy doing them. I have studied numerous religions, and find them all to follow the same tenant as my first question, so no need to change. So in reality as long as I maintain my present course of action of being in the moment and staying fluid within that moment of now, then regardless of knowing how much time I have or do not have is ergo immaterial. So in fact the above quote can now be further modified into "Life is what I choose to do while I continue to live." Perhaps a more affirmative slant, yet the attitude and tone makes all the difference in the world. I wish you a wonder-full life without regrets making the last call worth it.
Last call? Happily I am on board, see you later.
At the age of 68, I am aware of many things which I used to be capable of, which are no longer a possibility for me. Things like running 800 meters in 2:04 or grabbing the rim of a basketball hoop---both were available to me at age 18. On the other hand, my reasoning abilities, my understanding of "how the world works", continues to evolve and vastly exceeds my understanding at age 18. And, of course, the joy and happiness of a child is something that everyone keeps trying to recapture, generally without success, later in life. Each moment is special, because each moment occurs along a continuum of abilities and capabilities. Do your best, with what you have at the moment, and you will eventually look back without regret.
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