Welcome to the 3rd edition of the Carnival of Healing! The theme of this week’s Carnival of Healing is primarily of Letting Go. Looking ahead: Next week the carnival will begin traveling to new places. I will be hosting the…

My personal goal is to be in constant conversation with God asking what would be most pleasing to him throughout the day. This helps with the friction between wondering if I were going to live only one more day or forty more years.

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“Now listen, you who say, ‘Today or tomorrow we will go to this or that city, spend a year there, carry on business and make money.’ Why, you don’t even know what will happen tomorrow. What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes. Instead, you ought to say, ‘If it is the Lord’s will, we will live and do this or that.’” - James 4.13-15

If it isn’t part of your present, it isn’t part of your future.

I was a bit more conscious about what I was doing that day. While I didn’t do anything out of the ordinary, I did notice that I was being more aware of what I did with my possible “last hours”. I prayed a bit more than I had before as well.

Obviously, I survived the flight, although I’ll say that the landing was a bit unstable with the strong crosswinds…man was that scary! For some time afterwards, I was feeling really good about life in general. I still made a good effort to make the best use of my time. I also try to be more conscious of things that I would say or do differently if I only had 24 hours left.

Naturally, I can’t just drop everything one day to travel or something like that, but I know that one day in my life is equal to my whole life. As Steve Chandler says, it’s mathematical. If I live each day the way I want to live my life, then I must live my life the way I live my days. Whether I die tomorrow or when I’m 130, if I live each day the best way I can, then I will necessarily live my life the best way I can.

It has been some time since I took that flight, and I find that the feeling I had around that time isn’t with me anymore. It’s good to be reminded of things like how you live your life. Recently I found myself tired and was about to lie down to watch television. Then I realized that it would be a terrible way to waste my time and decided to read a book instead. Maybe it was because I knew I had a goal of reading a book a week and just wanted to chip away at it, but the point is that I still try not to abuse the time I have in life.

On the other hand, while I agree the exercise does seem like it should help me figure out what’s not important I have no idea what really is. Email doesn’t seem important but given living 7000 to 10000 miles away from my family maybe e-mail or blog entry would be best to say goodbye.

I guess I can say I really don’t like this exercise because I can’t answer the question. Sure if I had a family I’d want to spend time with them. My wife, my kids but I don’t so there really is nothing I can’t think of doing special if I only had 24 hours to live and that’s just depressing. Maybe I would try to connect with someone on that last day either for real or like above but I suspect I wouldn’t have any more luck than I’m having now. Maybe my inhibitions would be less. Maybe I would be less choosy about who I picked, knowing there is no future I wouldn’t care that there was no long term outlook on these women. hmm, maybe that first part is useful to my everyday life. No inhibitions means more chances so that’s probably a good insight from this exercise. I’m not sure the second one is though.

Based on my personal understanding, there is no such thing as ‘luck’, ‘random’ and ‘chaos’ although things might sometimes seem that way for sure. As Steve Jobs mentioned in his commencement address at Stanfard, it is possible to connect the dots in the past. You can’t look at now or to the future and try to connect them there.

As you mentioned Steve, sometimes things that happen to us are not fair, nice or welcome, but they happen anyway. I am sure there is a good reason why they happen although I might not personally understand it all perfectly with my own limited intelligence and consicousness. Why do earthquakes happen? This has some good explanations. Why does it happen to certain people, and why do some of them have to die? That is more difficult to answer.

What I do know is to live my life in a way that will benefit others for I can not take anything with me when I die but my consciousness and the deeds I’ve done while I was alive. I try to push the envelope to the point where things I contribute to others will continute to serve them long after I am gone. If I can do that, then this will be a lifetime that was worth living…

For example, suppose you realize that on your last day, you’d spend more time outside. This might give you the idea to find ways to enjoy more outdoor activities on a regular basis.

Thinking about how you’d spend your final day (and even doing a dry-run as an experiment) can help refine how you spend your non-final days.

So for example if I had 30 days to live, instead of 24 hours, I would take a trip to the Danube Delta, which I love. Can’t get there in 24 hours though.

And if I had 1 year to live I would probably stop working and travel around the world.

But if I had 5 years to live I would work harder 4 of them because that’s enough time to accomplish some ideas I have. Then I’d travel the last one.

And so on… I would eat a lot of sweets in my last 24 hours, but not if I had another year to live, etc.

So I guess you can’t live every day as if it was your last one. And I am not sure you can use that criteria to determine what is important or not for you.