I have just been reading another wonderful little book by Richard Bach called “One”. I first came across Richard’s books when I was introduced to Jonathan Livingston Seagull over 30 years ago. JLS can take you half an hour to read or a lifetime; it can be a simple story about a Seagull are a complex parable about learning. For many years I never left the house without a seagull on a chain around my neck, until the day that I realised the seagull had flown away when the chain broke,  never to be seen by me again.

Anyway, back to this latest book “One”. He posits a situation and an exercise that I challenge you to take on yourself. Somehow or other  he meets himself in the future and that future self  knows, for certain, that he only has six months to live. Let me give you the exercise by quoting from the book:

“I think we ought to take this napkin here”, she reached into her purse, “and this pencil, and we ought to list what we want to do most and make this the best six months, the best time in our lives. What would we do if there were no doctors with their dos and don’ts? They can’t cure you, so who are they to tell others what to do with whatever time we have left? I think we ought to make this list and then go ahead and do what we want.”

I don’t know whether the subject of this piece was lucky or not that he knew for sure that he had another six months to live. I don’t know whether or not I will be alive when you read this entry-there is no reason why I shouldn’t be but who knows what happens on the roads or in that complex biochemistry that keeps is running every day?

So my challenge to you is to do the exercise, to figure out what it is that you want to do (not need to do – that’s usually someone else’s agenda), to make a list and to get out there and do it. Oh, there will be challenges, but isn’t a life full of those anyway? Yes, you might upset a few people but you are living your life and you probably only have one of them so you might as well get the most out of it.

And some people will tell you that it’s impossible, selfish, not affordable, etc  – those are their hangups. So let them deal with them rather than dump them on you. I urge you do this exercise , after all you might only have six months to live.