Daily Buddhist [Wednesday Wisdom]

By Brendan Barca & Pema Sherpa

Age-old Buddhist wisdom for modern living. Weekly insight loved by over 18,000 practitioners. 🙏

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If You Had Only One Year to Live

If you had only one year to live, what would you do?

Quit your job? Travel the world? Join a sangha? Get a divorce? Apologize to your sister?

When we’re posed a question like this, our minds may experience a mix of excitement and panic. Only a year? But I haven’t lived enough.

And yet, when we slow down for a moment, we see that this thought experiment can give us insight into what it means to really start living.

The idea isn’t to take one final look at our bucket list and start crossing everything off (although that certainly may be part of it). Instead, we can use this exercise to get better in touch with ourselves and discover new possibilities for living life more fully, intentionally, compassionately, and with greater presence.

Try asking yourself the question again, but this time, listen with your heart rather than your mind:

If you had only one year to live, what would you do?

Did any new answers come up for you? Did it feel lighter this time? Did you notice a shift?

While the mind tends to grasp too tightly, the heart knows how to let go. It’s from this place of spaciousness that we may find the answers we’ve been searching for. Maybe you find yourself wanting to be kinder, lighter, and freer.

Whatever you discover, start there today. And when tomorrow comes, begin the practice again.

The truth is that none of us knows when the last year of our life begins. So why wait to live a little more fully?

P.S. This post was inspired by Stephen Levine’s wonderful book, A Year to Live (highly recommended)

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Thanks for being here!

Brendan & Pema

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