If You Had Only One Year to Live...

Time limits. Everything we do has time limits. Everything. We have to be at work at a certain time. We take lunch at a certain time. Our favorite show lasts one hour. So what if our life had a time limit, too? What would we do?


Let's say that someone tells you that you have only one year to live. Only one year to fix everything you've messed up. 365 days to do everything you ever wanted to do. 12 months to start doing better for yourself and other. 52 weeks to set everything right. Would you?


What kinds of things would you change in your daily life? Would you quit your job and travel to all the places you've always wanted to see? Would you tell everyone everything you've always wanted to say to them? Would you spend more time with family? Would you donate all your money to charity? Would you help others as much as you can? Would you start going to church? Would you start believing in God and the devil? Or would you stop believing in anything?


Why, just because you now know when you're going to die, should you change how you live? Billions of people go through their everyday life without knowing when they'll meet their end. They don't change their daily routine. They don't quit their jobs and try to make up for lost time. They don't all the sudden start donating all their money to charity, or find that one person they've been pining for and tell them their true feelings.


My point is this. If we one day know our life will end, why would we try to change things? That just means that we haven't been living the way we wanted to or should have been all along. I mean, that's why people change in the first place, right? They see something about themselves that they don't like, they figure out a way to change it, and they do it.


As far as we know, yes, we will all die one day. We don't know (or at least, most of us don't know) when that day will be. So as for now, we could all die tomorrow, so why aren't we living for ourselves and acting like this is our last day on earth? Why are the choices we make everyday not ones we would make if we knew it was our last day? We have to start living as though we won't be around tomorrow to change our ways and make up for lost time.