A good friend who I’d known since college died recently. He had only told a very few people that he had been diagnosed with an extremely aggressive form of cancer and that nothing could be done to treat it. So while he and his wife had about a month to prepare themselves, it came as a shock and without any warning to nearly all his friends. What stands out about him and the way he conducted his last time with us was that he didn’t pull away from any of us, even as he was going through this…he continued to interact with us, laughing, teasing us, regaling us with stories from the years on tour with his band and so on. To us, he was just himself, getting a real and relatively uncensored kick out of life, just like always. “Living my best life” is how he put it.
Losing him has shaken a lot of us. How do we take and move on from this?
One approach (and I think he would have appreciated it) is to take it as a wake-up call that time is always too short and that life is fragile. Living a purposeful life should start now and not tomorrow. We should decide on the relationships we want and begin to build them NOW. If we’re not surrounded by trusted friends we can laugh with until the end, we need to start making them today. If we want something different in life, we need to make the changes that will make that life possible NOW.
Wake-up calls tell us that it is time to stop dithering and decide who we want to be, what we want to accomplish, and who we want to share our time with….and to implement those decisions NOW. We won’t become our ideal self all-at-once. It takes time to accomplish things. And finding the best people to call friends can take a lifetime. But the phone is ringing and we need to start doing the work now. So take a deep breath, decide that it’s time, and take an intentional step. Then another. Make every day better than the one before. Make every week the best you can by learning from and improving based on the week before. Plan it and do the work. Do it now. LIVE your best life.
