Life Lesson: The Wristwatch Concept of Life

When a doctor tells people that they have a terminal illness, their feelings about time become intense. Suddenly they fear there’s not enough of it. Here’s another of life’s contradictions: moving from abstract to real, you see your time as limited for the first time. But does any doctor really know when someone has six month? No matter what we know about the average length of survival, you cannot know when you will die. You have to grapple with the reality of not knowing. Sometimes the lesson becomes clear. Standing at the edge of life, you want to know how much time you have left, but you realize that you have never known. In looking at the lives and deaths of others we often say that people died before their time. We feel their lives were incomplete, but there are only two requirements for a complete life: birth and death. In fact, we rarely pronounce a life complete unless the person lived to be ninety-five years old and had a great life. Otherwise, we proclaim the death premature.

Beethoven was “only” fifty-seven when he died, yet his accomplishments were tremendous. Joan of Arc was not even twenty when her life was taken, yet she is remembered and venerated today. John F. Kennedy Jr. died with his wife and sister-in-law at age thirty-eight. He never held an elected office, yet he was more loved than many of the US presidents. Were any of these lives incomplete? This question takes us back to the wristwatch concept of life, by which everything is measured and judged artificially. But we don’t know what lessons others are supposed to learn, we don’t know who they were supposed to be or how much they were supposed to have. As hard as it may be to accept, the reality is that we don’t die before our time. When we die, it is our time.

Our challenge is to fully experience this moment – and it’s a great challenge. To know that this instance contains all the possibilities for happiness and love and not lose these possibilities in expectation of what the future should look like.

by David Kessler from: Life Lessons

from Tuesdays with Morrie comes a similar message: "Fear of aging reflects unsatisfied and unfulfilled lives, lives that haven't found meaning"