Sandra Yeaman

A prompt from 13 Steps to Awakening:

“Clock” (CC BY-ND 2.0) Photo by  Jurgen Leckie 

“Imagine you woke up with a sharp pain this morning. You went to the doctor, they ran a bunch of tests and determined that you have a stage 4 cancer with less than 30 days to live. What thoughts will be going through your head? What would you be doing for the next 30 days?” from Key 1: Value of Time, 13 Steps to Awakening.

When I came across the 13 Steps to Awakening series, I decided to try them out. The first lesson opened with the above exercise, a good prompt for writing a short piece. The lesson includes homework assignments as well, which I hope to complete as I work through the lessons.

The first thought that crossed my mind when considering this scenario is that I would stop spending time alone. And that could mean no longer writing, or at least no longer writing the memoir I’ve been working on for the past year.

From childhood I felt I would be a writer, and my journal entries from my early adult years are full of statements about how I looked forward to including some of the interesting characters I met in my years of living overseas in future writing. But I also felt I needed experience in order to write. So I put the goal on hold and spent my time in search of an interesting life, something worth writing about. I delayed writing, though I have never felt that I stopped living an interesting life; I simply adjusted how much of my time I devoted to experiencing life first and writing about it until I retired and could grab the 8-10 hours per day (my husband would argue those numbers are too low) I had been spending on work.

But no matter how much I want to write, I would prefer to spend time with the people I love and care about, as well as the people who may not know how much impact they have had on my life. Assuming I could still travel, I would spend my final days traveling to see the important people in my life in order to tell each person how important they have been. If my health did not permit travel, I would resort to traveling in my mind and writing letters to those I wanted to see with the message I would have conveyed in person.

The above prompt is part of the first of 13 free lessons, developed by Alex Moses, Life Strategist, available on the A Life Answers website, shared with his permission.