“If You Had 6 Months to Live….”
Would it change your priorities?
Recently the question was sprung on me, “Suppose you learned you had just six months to live.” As I’ve found such queries useful in the past when I wanted to focus my priorities and actually finish something I’d started, I paid attention.
The question is serious, not frivolous. None of us knows when our number is up. There are just too many factors outside our control. But that doesn’t tell us the best way to approach this.
Suppose you learned you had … say … pancreatic cancer, which is bad news since it has virtually no symptoms until it’s too late. I had an uncle who passed away from that in just four months following the diagnosis back in 2015. I’ve had friends who lost their lives to pancreatic cancer. It’s nothing to brush off.
So it’s possible, this is more than a mere thought experiment.
If you learned you had something you’d pass from in six months (or four months or eight months or whatever), what would it change about your priorities?
That depends on you, obviously. But might it not still bring about a major reorientation of what’s important in your life.
Maybe family is important, and you fear you’ve been neglectful here because of work. I get that accusation sometimes from…
