How Many Weeks Do You Have Left to Live?
What is your hum in the meantime?
Have you ever thought about googling your death? Can you imagine if one day, in a search engine, a little box appeared with your photo and name and birthdate and death date? And some note about how. Sadly, she succumbed. . . Her family was shocked by an accident. . . Or after a long battle with. . . There is such a date, of course, for us all. And I suspect it’s a mercy that we don’t know it, although I would ask you — if you knew you had 15 weeks or 1,000 days or 624 weekends left, would you spend time doing things that bother or suppress you, deep in your heart and gut? Or would you make time to do things that reflect back your own light, your own thoughts, grow you forward?
Whatever you believe about the afterlife, there is powerful evidence that when this life ends, it ends. We are no longer this combination of molecules. This set of skin and bones and hair (or none) and eye color and height and shape and sound of voice and breath and physical complications and heart and streams of experiences and stacks of knowledge. We might find ghosts or traces or take actions to keep a person’s trace alive, but we cannot lay our hands on each other once we are dead. We cannot look into each other’s eyes. Hear that particular laugh. The physical us decays irrevocably.
I’m reading a book in a fantasy series where two main characters die and then are magically brought back. The second time it happens, it feels like a cheap fiction move. A cheap and easy way to ratchet up emotion and suspense and then, pish-posh, move the story forward. A messing-around-with-that-which-we-know-to-be-true-but-want-to-reject. Also, both times, as a reader, I was deeply relieved. Oh, good! Not dead! It’s fantasy, yay! Because I want more story. I always want more story. We love a story of the after-story because we want more time. We want more time for more story to unfold, for the characters to grow, find themselves, figure out love or mercy or claim their talents and show us how to do it. I forgive this cheap move because I want to see what’s next. I forgive this cheap move because I wish it was real. But it is not real. The day that you are living right now is one of a limited number.
What I’m saying here is that your life is the story you are making.
If you can’t be brought back to life with a fresh understanding of what is at stake, how do you want to live today?
Are you making the story you want?
Are you choosing?
If you want to write, make music, make art, be with people with whom the love is clear and whole, are you doing it?
I don’t take existence for granted. I believe that it is my work in this life to create a life I want to live. I’m relentless like that. I want the days full. I want the conversations to be meaningful. Because I know that one day I’m going to die. And there is no getting back one single second of the life we lived. No do-overs. For about 50 years, I just let life happen to me because I thought that was the only choice, to surf it. Trained to live life as a woman, I prioritized the needs of others. Then a powerful and elongated experience of grief woke me up, and I realized that this is it. My life. My version of this incarnation of being alive. The choices I make, teeny tiny choices every day along with the bigger gestures of how, this is it. My life.
Now I seek a certain true - true - true hum between the world and myself, and I make choices accordingly.
When I’m talking to writers, I am keenly aware that if they don’t write what they imagine themselves writing someday, that it will never exist. That after the little google box listing their death appears, we will not have this after-story, this trace, this evidence of their thoughts and life. This gift. It’s lost forever. I imagine the poverty of a world without some of the images and reference points that authors have bequeathed to me, like Dickinson’s line, “Tell all the truth but tell it slant—,” which opened an alternative way of writing and being to me. Or the complexity of a character like Tolkien’s Gollum, who illuminated the truth of a “both/and” way of living, that what is loathsome can also be tender and heartbreaking. Or how Garcia Marquez’s José Arcadio Buendía taught me that “Today is Monday, too,” altering my understanding of time forever. These writers chose to write down their visions, and their choice subsequently altered me.
Let’s say you have 4 weeks, 100 weeks, 1,000 weeks, 5,000 weeks. What will you do in these weeks that will speak to your hum? What will you choose that honors the hum between you and the world? Will you write? Will you sing to yourself? Will you go see the water more often? Will you stop and watch the bird? Will you draw? Will you think about the sunshine that makes the strawberry? Will you sit quietly instead of reacting? Will you laugh hard? Will you look at all the eyes in the restaurant? Will you wait and see when it’s time to wait and see? Will you close your eyes when you eat something delicious? Will you choose, will you choose, will you choose on behalf of your own hum?
Do you feel like writing?
Join me in this Free Webinar, Experiments with Writing Craft, April 21, 6-8 pm MT, on Zoom.
There will be prompts and cool shit you can do to play with words. It will be thought-provoking and fun, and it’s free, baby. Because I choose this hum of alchemy and collaboration again and again.
Love the "One Hundred Years of Solitude" ref.
Greetings! Is the webinar 4/10 or 4/21? !Gracias!