Someone once said that life isn’t measured by how many breaths you take but by how many moments take your breath away.
I pretty much despise that line. It’s so corny. Except it’s true.
Each of us probably know (or know of) at least one person who’s lived more in two or three years than most people live in a lifetime. It’s especially natural during wartime when everyone’s either killed or forced to really live.
But it doesn’t have to remain the domain of war-torn citizens. And it doesn’t have to always be someone else. I think each of us, if we’re purposeful about it, can live quite a long life in quite a short time.
For the sake of, I don’t know, practicality, I’ll say 10 years. But I’m sure some people, maybe even you, could and will do it in way less time. Here are a few suggestions I’ve been thinking about lately:
- Move to a foreign country, at least once
- Learn a foreign language to fluency
- Live in at least three different places
- Run a marathon
- Earn a degree
- Learn three skills to mastery (woodworking, needlepoint, etc.)
- Create and teach a class on something that interests you
- Change jobs, at least five times
- Change occupations, at least twice
- Change your diet completely
- Get married
- Have kids, at least two
- Adopt kids
- Build a business
- Read 100 books, each on a completely different subject
- Write a book
- Meet and get to know at least one new person every, single month
Trash the TV, follow the list, document the process. I’m guessing it’ll feel like a lifetime in less than 10 years.
The constant through all this, you might notice, is change. Change ties this all together, change and the decisions that create it. The faster the change, the slower the time.
So the quick answer to living a long life in a short time, the one I’m playing with, is to keep changing as fast as possible.
