What If You Already Knew
The one thing we know and keep living like we don't
Since Arlo joined the family my morning routine has shifted. Until he is ready to hang solo in those early morning hours I now have replaced my workout time with puppy time. I have had to adjust the schedule.
He’s up early, I’m the one who gets him, and so that means a dark, quiet house. Coffee. A book.
The other morning, I was reading about a woman who lost her mother. Pancreatic cancer. Fast and sudden…no warning. She said: If I had known, I would have done things differently.
And each time I read a passage like this or a story I tend to think. We all know.
There is one fact about your life that is completely, absolutely certain. It ends. No matter what Bryan Johnson says.
The only unknown is when. And somehow, lost in the background, we’ve let the uncertainty of when cancel out the certainty of the fact. We live like the unknown timing makes the known outcome optional.
It doesn’t. And like always, here is the math.
31,025 days. 85 years. Roughly where the actuaries put a reasonably healthy life. That’s it. That’s the whole supply.
I’m 46. As of this morning, I’ve used 17,001 of them. Which means if the math stays true, which is pretty likely, I have somewhere around 14,024 left.
More than half of my boxes are checked. Colored in.
I keep a chart on my wall, which I have shared before, called My Life In Weeks. Every week of my life represented as a small square. I fill them in as they pass. Most people who see it for the first time think it is morbid…perhaps.
Because it’s one thing to think about the finite nature of life, but it’s another to see it each day. To each week fill in the squares. The actual countdown. And even if I miss a week, it doesn’t mean it doesn’t get filled in.
All that to say is those seven days in a week move forward each day. We all have heard it. Where did the week go. I can’t believe it’s Friday. Man, the weekend went by fast.
All circling back to one of my favorite words. Presence. And the importance of it showing up each and every day in your life.
We have all had them. The days where it doesn’t show up. The ones where you get to the end and realize you remember almost nothing. You were there…you drove somewhere, sat in meetings, answered messages, ate something, dropped off at practice…but you weren’t there. Yet, nothing left a mark. Nothing brought you into the moment. And it falls off the calendar like an empty piece of paper.
That is the cost of not being in the moment. Not slowing down. Not trying to look around.
And it is why I loved Bronnie Ware’s book so much.
She spent years in palliative care. She sat with people at the end, when the filters were gone and the time for pretending was over. She heard the stories. The regrets. And what she heard wasn’t random. There was a thread tying them all together.
I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself.
I wish I hadn’t worked so much.
I wish I’d stayed in touch with my friends.
I wish I’d said what I felt.
I wish I’d let myself be happier.
Read that list slowly. Does any of it surprise you? Or do you already know which ones belong to your life right now?
I think that’s why it is so important to me. I read this list, I see these things even in my own life.
We know the ending. And most of us already know what we’ll wish we’d done differently. The only variable is time. And we keep treating time like it’s unlimited.
I’ve written about 9:03 before. If you’ve been here for a bit, you know the story. What I want to say here, I think with more clarity than I have acknowledged to myself before, is that it took me a long time to actually accept.
Years. Not days or months. Years.
Even after everything that morning showed me. Even after walking away that day. Even with the chart on my wall and the pendant around my neck and what I have built my work around. The gap between knowing and living like you know is stubborn. It takes time to close. And some days, unfortunately, it grows wider.
Because accepting the known, and I mean really accepting it in your heart and not just as a concept you can discuss, means accepting that eventually like Tony Soprano in the finale…the lights will go black. Mid-sentence. Mid-bite. Mid-day. No dramatic close. No warning. Just the ordinary moment that turns out to be the last one.
I don’t think most of us ever fully get there. I still have a long way to go, but I’m further along than I was. And the distance I’ve covered has come from one thing more than anything else.
Presence.
Not a practice or technique. Just the decision, made again today, to actually be in the day I’m in. To let what’s happening matter while it’s happening. To not save the good stuff for later. Because later is not guaranteed. Later is the unknown.
Today is the only known.
So I’ll ask it plainly. What would you do differently if you knew?
And then the real answer. You do know.
You have a number of days. You just don’t know the exact number. But the boxes are being filled in. And the people you love, the things you want to feel, the version of yourself you keep meaning to become…none of that is waiting for you on the other side of later.
It’s here. In the days you’re actually in.
This is great. On my good days — when I’m feeling the importance of what you wrote here — I like to think of each day like a box. My basement has one for each day into which I can stuff memories. I want as many of them to be full as of memories as possible.