The other day I was walking through the bookstore and my eyes fell upon a book entitled One Month to Live. I didn't bother to read much of it, since Rick Warren wrote the foreword. I figured it was just 40 Days of Purpose, minus ten. I'm all for books encouraging better living. But thinking about it now, I wonder, does the "you might not wake up tomorrow" mentality really change anything?
After all, most if not all people have plans for their lives-- whether these be verbalized or not. Can the remembrance of our mortality change those plans, or does it simply hasten those plans?
It's all well and good if your plans are to commit a year to volunteering in an underdeveloped country. But what if you just want to traipse around Europe? Take a road trip to every single contiguous state? Can the revelation that you will die in thirty days change the way you live, or just change the order in which you live?
Maybe it can for some people. But for most of those some people, I believe a crucial component is the belief in an afterlife. That is, the knowledge that you can live again. Or die again, forever.
If life on this earth is all we have, then a deathclock wouldn't change us in any significantly positive way. Where would the motivation for doing good be, if we thought that once we kicked the can, that was it? You buy the farm and then it spontaneously combusts. Not even. It just disappears. There has to be that belief in eternity, or for the vast majority "living like you were dying" would mean completing a laundry list of fun activities, visiting thousands of places mentioned in hundreds of books.
To all those fans of living like you were dying, I say don't live thinking of how the end is near; live instead knowing there is no real end.
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