Self-Knowledge Question #5: Before I Die

[ng_moonmoth]

Initial post on what I'm doing here.

5. What’s holding you back from living the life you would live if you were dying? [That was how the question was worded. The reference points to "dying soon" (six months from now), though, and that is how I answered it.]

I am dying. We all are dying. No one here makes it out alive. So I still want to do all that. I just believe I have more time, and I would much rather use it. I'd prefer not to try and jam everything into six months.

Comments

[redsixwing]

>>I'd prefer not to try and jam everything into six months.<<

Same hat?

I dislike this line of questioning. There are more things I want to do than six months would hold even with a lot of funding* and while, yes, I can pick... there's things I am doing now that I don't expect to fully be complete until well after I'm gone.

Earth certainly is full of things.

*that I don't have

[ng_moonmoth]

>> Same hat? <<

???

>> I dislike this line of questioning. There are more things I want to do than six months would hold even with a lot of funding* and while, yes, I can pick... there's things I am doing now that I don't expect to fully be complete until well after I'm gone. <<

I'd say that's true for anyone. I read the question as "Edit the things you want to do with your life down to what can be done in six months with the resources at your disposal. What does that six months look like?", and then focused on celebrating what I would be able to do, not lamenting what I would have to forego.

Meanwhile, I hope you can or have set up processes now, so the things that won't complete while you are around to do them actually have a chance to be completed. And that you can get the same satisfaction from having done that, that designers and builders of great edifices around the world obtained from their work on things they knew from the start they would never see finished.

[redsixwing]

Sorry. Same hat.

>> I read the question as "Edit the things you want to do with your life down to what can be done in six months with the resources at your disposal. What does that six months look like?", and then focused on celebrating what I would be able to do, not lamenting what I would have to forego.<<

I feel like that's a much better way to look at it. My usual complaints include "if I did this, I'd have no resources left afterward," and that's not a sustainable way to live. Usually, this question is followed by some variant of "so why aren't you living that way now?" and like. I have to eat seven months from now too, and pretending otherwise will not change the price of beans.

If I change the question to 'use the resources at your disposal only in a way that reflects the fact that you are, in fact, probably still going to be here six months from now*' then... hm.

*an assumption useful to make, even if unsupported by evidence