Letters left to write
Last night, I contemplated death —
I felt it was time to return to an old practice. Somehow, it felt long overdue.
I’ve written about this particular exercise before. You try to image, as lively as you possibly can, that you are faced with the stone-cold certainty that you have only one year left to live. There’s no pretending, you really have to believe it, look the end of (your) existence in the eye.
Next, you examine your life.
One year is long enough to still do a number of meaningful things. But you are out of spare time, out of “yeah, sure, I’ll do it, someday, when I’m retired, or when I have run out of excuses” time. Suddenly, things come into focus.
Is there anything you would do differently, with only this one year left to live?
Are there things you are now doing out of duty or sense of obligation, that you feel you would immediately discard in the face of death? Are there other pursuits that launch themselves at you, screaming they really want to be done, felt, experienced, appreciated… right now, now there still is — a little — time?
That is the great reward of this harrowing exercise: it suddenly becomes very easy to make choices.
Now is the time. It always has been.
Don’t waste any more of it. This practice, if done correctly, will show you with piercing clairy where your heart is.
It had been a while since I had put myself through this particular exercise.
I have done it several times in the past, and initially it taught me a great deal. The confrontation with mortality is invariably a tough one, and I quickly learned that if I wanted to live truly, I had to readjust my inner compass. For I had acquired the habit (like almost all of us have) of postponing the things that really mattered to me, only to have them screaming in my face when it might be too late.
I began to listen to this inner voice, and took its concerns seriously, in a conscious way. And for the last decade or so, I have felt confident that I was exactly where I wanted to be, doing what I wanted to be doing. If I thought about dying, I could only say: ‘Yep, one more year of exactly all of this, thank you very much’.
Mind you, my life wasn’t perfect. It never has been. But being able to reach this conclusion meant that I was getting, out of my time here, all that truly mattered to me right here and now. I wasn’t leaving any deep old cravings or dreams buried ‘for later’. And I can assure you: flawed as any life may be, this is a great way to live.
So I don’t even really know why I decided to go through with this good old routine once again. I just felt it tugging at my sleeve, so to speak. And I realized it had indeed been a while. So I dove in.
I was a little anxious, I admit. I had never done it while on such a great, fulfilling, creative vibe as where I find myself surfing right now. I considered myself a very happy and lucky person at this point in my life. All I wanted to do, was continue with what I was doing. The crest of a wave is not the most likely place to start questioning what you’re doing, right? But were there any unforseen insights waiting for me here?
The results were almost as surprising as they had been the very first time around.
I stood in front of our living room window and looked up into the canopy of oak trees, shielding our house, and home to magpie nests, blackbirds, crows, finch and tits, and I thought about my life ending in the near future. My sight blurred and I could feel the tears starting to run down my face.
(I was never a very emotional person. Until I became a mother, that is. Crazy what those hormones will do to your inner wiring… And a few years later, my Soul Journey cracked open whatever there was left of me to crack. Since then, I immediately know when something is of enormous importance to me, for it will frequently involve tears I can’t explain. I have even started to understand what medieval monks and mystics are on about when they talk of tears as a sign of the heart being filled by God. I don’t know about God, but I do know about tears by now…)
But anyway, no, there weren’t any important projects I felt were left untended or undone. And sure, I would love some more time to continue doing more of what I had been doing lately, but I didn’t even care anymore whether some old manuscripts I loved would finally get published or not. The flow of love and family and creativity that I was surfing on was, more than ever, really, exactly, where I wanted to be.
I did, however, see a line of people in my mind’s eye. People I loved. People I wanted to thank. People I wanted to tell just how much I loved them or valued them, or how much they had changed my life. People I wanted to point a safe path into the future, like my son, or people it broke my heart to leave. Not because I was afraid of abandoning my own life, but because I didn’t want my absence to be a smoldering crater in theirs.
If I had but another year to live, my priority right now would be to write all of them the most heartfelt letter I was capable of.
I’ll admit it: it came as a surprise.
Not only because I had in fact done a lot of this already last fall, when I held my Soul Circle and thanked all the Very Imporant People in my life who were able to attend for the parts they had fulfilled or were fulfilling in my existence up to that moment. Also, this was the very first time, going through this familiar exercise, that I came to this very particular conclusion. And it taught me that in the course of the last few years, my focus in life has changed.
It has moved from the things I do and the projects I value to the relationships I have forged, the ways in which I have opened my heart and soul to life and other people. Connection has claimed the ground personal ambition once used to hold.
So when I contemplate dying now, instead of seeing some or other unfulfilled dream throwing itself at my feet, I am in the company of all the people I love and for the life of me don’t want to leave.
Reading this, you might consider me selfish. And perhaps I am.
We could very well come to the conclusion that it has taken me a good chunk of my life to reach this point where my love for others has finally eclipsed my personal interests. But I will not judge myself. I have always tried to be truthful. And this is what I have come to understand right now: I am a very blessed person. To be able to do what I do. To be surrounded like I am. To be able to love like I do, and be loved in return.
And if I am to take this exercise seriously, why shouldn’t I write a couple of those love letters that I envisioned as I was standing in front of the window, looking up at the trees, tears running down my cheaks?
Why wait until there’s no time left?
