To Live A Life Of Substance

All living things in the universe have an end. We are all mortal beings, whether we choose to accept this fact or not. I could leave life right now, and in this realization I let it determine how I live my life. It is not that I have a short time to live, but that I have wasted a lot of it over the years. Life is long enough, and a sufficiently generous amount has been given to me for the highest achievements if it were all well invested. But when it is wasted in recklessness and denial of my mortality, I am forced at last by death’s final constraint to realize that it has passed away before I knew it was passing. So it is: I have not been given a short life but I make it short, and I have not been ill-supplied but wasteful of it. Life is long if I know how to live it. I then will prepare my mind as if I have come to the very end of life. I will postpone nothing, as one of the greatest mistakes in life is to think we have time, and will put the finishing touches on my life each day as if it were my last.

Ready or not, some day it will all come to an end. There will be no more sunrises, no minutes, hours, or days. All the things we've collected, whether treasured or forgotten, will pass to someone else. Our wealth, fame, and temporal capacities will shrivel to irrelevance. It will not matter what we owned or what we were owed. Our grudges, resentments, frustrations, and jealousies will finally disappear. So, too, our hopes, ambitions, plans, and to-do lists will expire. The wins and losses that once seemed so important will fade away. It won’t matter where we came from or what side of the town we lived in at the end. The borderlines and patriotisms we arbitrarily cling to will be inconsequential. It won’t matter whether we were accepted as beautiful or brilliant. Even our socially constructed genders and our skin colour will be irrelevant.

So what will matter? How will the value of our days be measured? What will matter is not what we bought but what we built; not what we got but what we gave. What will matter is not our success but our significance. What will matter is not what we learned but what we taught. What will matter is every act of integrity, compassion, courage, or sacrifice that enriched, empowered, or encouraged others to emulate our example. What will matter is not our competence but our character. What will matter is not how many people we knew but how many will feel a lasting loss when we’re gone. What will matter is not our memories but the memories of those who loved us. What will matter is how long we will be remembered, by whom, and for what. Living a life that matters doesn’t happen by accident. It’s not a matter of circumstance but of choice. I choose to live a life that matters, a life of substance, today and each new day I am graced with, because what I think and say and do matters to me and to those I share this life with.