“Somebody should tell us, right at the start of our lives, that we are dying. Then we might live life to the limit, every minute of every day.”
–Pope Paul VI
Every minute of every day we live is precious, and should be lived to the fullest. But most of us don’t realize just how precious life is until we face circumstances that threaten to shorten our lives. For example, what if you were diagnosed with a terminal illness and told that you had only six more months to live? Would you become more conscious of how you spend each hour of every day? Would you make basic changes in the way you are currently living? If you would, then you are presently making a huge mistake by taking life for granted. Life is a precious gift from God, and we should not waste any of it. For all of us, life hangs by a slender thread, and none of us can know for sure how long we have left to live, even if we are young and healthy.
Many of us spend our lives the same way we spend our money. If we think we have unlimited amounts of money, we will tend to spend much of it wastefully, and we won’t value it nearly as much as we would if we were almost broke. Similarly, when we are young, it seems to some of us almost like we will live forever, and we do not put a high value on any given hour or day. But none of us can ever be absolutely sure that we will still be alive even tomorrow, let alone decades from now. The one thing we can be absolutely sure about is that we have all been in the process of dying ever since the clock started ticking with our birth. Death is absolutely inevitable at some point, and nobody escapes it.
So one of the mistakes that many of us make is to not take death seriously enough and just assume that we have an abundance of time on this earth, when that might not be the case. People who make this mistake fail to get as much out of life as they would if they viewed life as something in short supply. On the other hand, some people diminish the quality of their life by being overly obsessed with death and dying. We all have to face death from time to time throughout life, and when it involves the death of a loved one, it takes a heavy toll on us. One of the reasons that the death of a loved one is so devastating is that it reminds us that we, too, will someday die. But we dare not become so obsessed with death that it reduces the quality of our ongoing life.
We have to live life one day at a time. We can’t change anything that has happened in the past, and we have very limited control over the future. If we focus on living every day to the fullest, most days will turn out pretty well. We will all have both good and bad days, but we cannot afford to diminish the quality of good days by focusing on bad things that have happened in the past, or by worrying about the fact that we will someday die. In the words of William Osler, “The load of tomorrow added to that of yesterday, carried today, makes the strongest falter.”
Think about it.
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Copyright 2025
Allen W. Smith
