10 Mar 2016

You wake up in the morning, rub the side of your coffee cup as you ponder the trees outside your window and poof! a genie appears. The genie tells you that on this day, 365 days from now, you will be dead. He disappears quicker than he appeared (he’s no Aladdin) and now you’re left in the kitchen with sleep in your eyes and your mug in your hand wondering what it is you’re supposed to do now.

So you start to really live as if every day counted. You do all the things on your bucket list, you tell everyone you love them, you hug your friends more than usual. You do all the things you wanted do one day but couldn’t for reasons society told you were valid. You don’t think about the long-term because your long-term doesn’t exist.

But get this: every day we get in cars (1 in 6,700 chance of dying), drink alcohol (1 in 811,000 chance) and walk past other people (1 in 16,000 chance of death by assault). Sometimes you go out dancing on a Saturday night (1 in 100,000 of dying) and if you’re feeling adventurous, you go mountain climbing (1 in 1,750). There are diseases and poisonings and viruses that wage war on our immune system. Regardless of statistics, it’s pure chance. You never know when your time is up.

With this in mind, why are you taking the path you’re on right now? Are you content there, or are you longing to jump on a plane (or jump out of one), to work out in the country, to learn an instrument or a different language, to travel across the world?

We can spend our whole lives locked up in an office cubicle, or in a classroom or outside shovelling soil, but what if you knew you only had 365 days left? Would you still be there?

I think I’d like to reach a point where, if a genie did appear one morning, I’d keep doing what I was doing before I was given the news. I’d want to be content with my achievements, or at least the path I’m on to achieving them. I want to be content with how much of the world I’ve seen, I want to feel secure in how regularly I tell my parents I love them. I don’t want to suddenly rush and run away and jump on a plane. I don’t want that kind of knowledge to ‘shake me up.’

If I knew the date of my death, I’d like to keep living my life exactly how I’m living it right now.

Wouldn’t you?