Here is an interesting situation to be in.

Imagine you are given $86,400 every morning when you get up. You are free to spend all or some of it as you deem fit. You can go shopping, travel, invest, or do anything your heart desires. There is only one catch, though: you have to spend this amount today. You can’t carry it forward to the next day. You can’t keep some aside. You have to spend it today. This is because you will get another $86,400 the next day too, which you can use on that day.

How would you spend it the next day? What would you do with that $86,400? You may be wondering why $86,400?

Well, 86,400 is the number of seconds we get each day to live.

It changes perspective, doesn’t it? Just to think that each second that we are living, we can’t get it back. Each second is passing us by. How are we living our lives? Are we living to our full potential? Are we spending our seconds wisely?

When I first read this analogy, it created an internal shift within me. It made me realise how I am spending my life and whether I am utilising my potential to its fullest or not. I recently used another interesting strategy to share with a family member about my memoir, which is on the cusp of being published. One of the arguments I was getting to not publish my memoir was the amount of shame, and I was told to publish it later. My sister chimed in, "You should publish this after Mom passes away, this way, she won't have to deal with the people." I counter-argued, what guarantee do I have I will live long? Why wait till tomorrow what I potentially could do today?

Then I pulled out my trump card. I took out a blank piece of paper and drew a straight line from one end of the page to the other end. I wrote down 0 at the beginning of the line and 77 at the end of the line (77 is the average life expectancy of a Pakistani man, even though my grandfather lived up to 91, and my own father lived up to 70 when he succumbed to cancer and passed away; I am using 77 just to demonstrate an example). Then, over the halfway point toward the right side of the line, I wrote down my current age: 47. So essentially, as I explained to my family, I have technically 30 years left to live (the green highlighted part on the image).

I wrote down significant milestones on this timeline:

• 2/3 years old: hearing loss

• 12 yrs: abuse

• 14 yrs: abuse

• 30 yrs: relocated to Pakistan; married

• 35 yrs: divorced

• 35 yrs: Dad passed away

• 35 yrs: started therapy and self-healing

• 40 yrs: changed career from architecture to psychotherapy

My family were blown away to witness my life this way. See, what I did was get my family to see the bigger picture instead of being caught up with the little things in life.

There is a purpose for my memoir. There is meaning behind my memoir.

Suddenly, the what-ifs and buts felt insignificant. Sometimes, it truly helps to see things from a bigger perspective, almost like getting a bird’s eye view of my own life. Viewing my life in this way certainly gives me a different lens into what I am doing. I can imagine myself floating up in the air and looking down at my life’s timeline: the past, the present and the future. Looking at life like this is more like a re-awakening. A re-awakening that brings in a sense of renewed priorities and opens up my mind to figure out what’s important in life.

In one of my favourite books, When Breath Becomes Air by Dr Paul Kalanithi, I was awestruck by one thought that he posited: if you knew you were going to die soon, how would you live your life for the remaining time you have on earth? Similarly, in another book, A Matter of Death and Life, by the renowned psychotherapist Irvin D. Yalom, co-written along with his wife, the book addresses how it is to live life knowing your spouse has cancer and has a certain amount of time to live. He essentially poses one profound thought: if you knew and accepted your mortality, how would you want to live your life? Does it change your outlook on life?

So when I know technically I have this many number of years left, I know what are the important things I need to do. Get rid of toxic people from my life. Make those travel plans. Learn all the skills I’ve been wanting to. Write a book (oh wait, I have done that!). Appreciate the right people people in my life a lot more. Spend a lot more time in gratitude. Create boundaries. Read more books. Prepare myself for the life hereafter. Somehow, I don’t feel morose about this kind of attitude; if anything, I feel I have a renewed zest for life.

We all have just one life on this planet. Just one chance at everything. Every second that passes by is gone, it won’t come back. We are not getting younger, our bodies are growing old with us. We will all die one day. That’s one thing guaranteed. But we also have a choice to live our life today the way we want to. I know it may sound morbid and all, but it becomes easier to accept once we acknowledge the fact that we are all going to die one day, and to have this perspective of how much active time we have left, we can decide how we want to utilise that time to our best.

So why not do those things today? What’s stopping you? What are you waiting for?

How would you like to spend the 86,400 seconds you have in your life today?

In gratitude,

Mansour Ahsan.

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You can reach me at:

mansourahsan@gmail.com

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