Prompt 1: #Trust 30

Gwen Bell – 15 Minutes to Live

We are afraid of truth, afraid of fortune, afraid of death, and afraid of each other. Our age yields no great and perfect persons. – Ralph Waldo Emerson

You just discovered you have fifteen minutes to live.

1. Set a timer for fifteen minutes.
2. Write the story that has to be written.

(Author: Gwen Bell)

To The Future Generations, This is what I know:

Life is too short to sit locked away in a cube or a factory, under the buzzing of fluorescent overhead lamps and copy machines.

Think about this—if you spend 40 hours at work each week, for 50 weeks out of the year, and you start scooping ice cream when you are 17 and stop shuffling papers when you are 70, that’s a total 104,000 hours of work that you have done in your lifetime.

When you look at that equation, it may seem like work is all that matters. Especially when you realize the time spent outside of work, the other 128 hours in each week, that that time is divided up between no less than family dinners, happy hour with friends, running to the laundromat, doctor’s appointments, trips to the gym, time on the toilet, sleep, reading, cooking spaghetti, and staring out the window. When you look at it that way, work gets the biggest piece of the pie.

But when you only have 15 minutes left to live, you will not recall much or perhaps anything you did in those 108,160 hours. You will not be thinking about flow charts or progress reports. You will be thinking about the people that you love, and how much time you spent with them on this brief Earth. You will wonder if it was enough. You will wonder if they ever knew how much they meant to you, if they know how much they touched your life. How much they made it better.

You won’t recall the details of your work, which ate up so much of your time, but you will recall the moments of your life with the ones you loved that were absolutely peaceful and still. You will recall events that perhaps only lasted a few days or even a few hours or a few moments: a quiet dinner in the summertime, overlooking a lake. You will call from memory every sound, every smell, even the slightest touch of a long-gone breeze against your skin or the laughter of someone on the other side of the room.

In the end, you will not be remembering the lifetime of effort or achievements that you piled up over the years. In the end, you might just be focused on a single memory. A single period of 15 minutes.

Comments

[Dragonfly]

Much to think about..mmmmmm!

[Noel]

@Dragonfly--Yep!

[Tracy Mangold]

Very true. It's the few and far between, the dimmed light of a day - that moment there that stands out that brought us immense pleasure, comfort, sense of peace that we take with us.

[Kim]

I love that you wrote this, you as a career-focused person who does what she can to help people find work and keep it. It's so easy to lose the focus of the rest of your life when we spend so much time working.

Both my parents died way too young, way shy of seventy. It's depressing to think about, I know, but it's also true that if your life is shorter than the average--and for most healthy people there's no way to know if that's going to be true--the proportions are even more startling. People who do what they love are people who live life deeply. It's worth it.