IF DEATH WERE NEAR ...

Everyone here is dying, whether we like it or not.
We cannot prevent it and we try not to think about it, but it is an indisputable fact of life. All of us are dying.
The only unknown is how fast we are dying. Will we die today? Tomorrow? Fifty years from now? We don't know and because we don't know we tend to live as if we will do so forever when, if we let ourselves think about it, we know that cannot be true.
I often wonder how much differently we'd all live if we knew when we would die. How would that effect our work? Our relationships? Our attitudes? Would we hate less, or more? Would we love more easily or even more restrictively than we do now? Would there be less poverty and less hoarding if we knew when we were to leave this life?
But we don't know, can't know and so we go on living as if we have years not minutes, decades and not hours or days left. We place great importance in things that will not last and little or no importance on the things that will. We hold desperately onto items and objects and readily dismiss and distance ourselves from people and relationships.
And we act as if love were something to take or leave, more often leaving than taking. Because, we figure, time will bring it around again and, if not, we'll find it somewhere farther down the line in someone else we have yet to meet.
I often think to myself, if I knew I was to die tomorrow, what would I be doing today? And while I know I cannot live my entire life that way, because to do so would be to give away everything and to live the rest of my life in poverty (though I am not certain that would necessarily be a bad thing), if I can carry a little of that reality, a little of that thinking into my everyday world, perhaps it will make me a better, more loving person.
Even if the rest of the world lives as if there are thousands of tomorrows to come.