As If It’s Your Last Day

If I lived today as if it were my last, what would I do?

If I lived today as if it were my last, what would I do?

That prompt The Daily Stoic Journal threw at me on December 1. I don’t know if my mind had been primed just right by the previous days’ prompts and that’s why this one stuck in my head so intractably, but it’s stayed with me.

The genius of this journal is that it gives you space to write a morning reflection and space for an evening reflection to a prompt, allowing for an initial reaction, time to think before writing a second reaction.

At first, I thought about my dad, who, in his hospital bed, signed checks to pay bills. It would be good to have one’s affairs in order before one goes, to make things easier for loved ones — and my dad could’ve made a will or a trust if that really was his intention, the checks weren’t necessary, I could easily have taken care of them. But that’s not the sort of thing I would want to do on my last day. I’d rather have all that nonsense done well in advance.

I thought of another way to phrase the question: “what would I want to do today if I knew I wouldn’t wake up tomorrow morning?”

I wrote down three things.

“I would play with my dog, write letters to friends, and go for a walk through the woods.”

In the evening I wrote,

“It’s one thing to think in the conditional (‘as if it were’) and another to actually act on it. I did one of those three things: I played with Uša. I could have done the other two. These are things I could do every day.”

And there it is. A reminder of how to live fully every day. Memento mori. I could write a quick card to a friend every day (they’re going to get lots of them if I do this, because I don’t have that many friends) and I could walk through woods and I definitely can play with a dog. Every single day.

Alright. I shared. Would you like to share?

Uša would and does play every day.