My friend’s sister died from a premature heart attack a few months ago.

Since then my friend has found herself looking at life differently… which is to be expected. What’s unexpected has been her take on how she doesn’t want to live her life.

I typically refer to mortality-inspired motivation to live as an urge to do things… to take action on the dreams and hopes and desires we hold within ourselves but often defer because we’re brazen enough to think we can act on them later. Death can definitely rouse us from our slumbering existence and spur us to learn how to speak French once and for all… finally go hand gliding… help build a school in a far away country after all these years of talking about it… etc. etc. etc.

But I don’t often talk about how death can prompt a reckoning of how we ~don’t~ want to live in our remaining Mondays. Death precipitates an abandonment of the bullshit.

My friend has tuned into a new talk track that sounds a lot like, “I don’t have time for this” … because she’s been starkly reminded how temporary her time is. She notices her limiting beliefs about her career, for example, and says, “I don’t have time for this attitude”—and she’s working on adjusting it. She realized she was spending time with people who didn’t light her up, and her new reflexive thought that “I don’t have time for this” has altered how she schedules her social calendar.

She recounted a quote from the inestimable Annie Lamott that choked me up:

“Oh my God, what if you wake up some day, and you’re 65, or 75, and you never got your memoir or novel written; or you didn’t go swimming in warm pools and oceans all those years because your thighs were jiggly and you had a nice big comfortable tummy; or you were just so strung out on perfectionism and people-pleasing that you forgot to have a big juicy creative life, of imagination and radical silliness and staring off into space like when you were a kid? It’s going to break your heart. Don’t let this happen.”

This reminds me of a tale I told in my book about Shay Moraga, the founder of Shay’s Warriors, a non-profit that supports cancer survivors:

Shay’s Circle

“I am so grateful I had cancer because it put a giant stop sign in my life,” Shay told me when we first met. “Cancer gave me a second chance at life.”

Shay shared that she had a ton of time to journal and reflect on how she wanted her life to be while she was in chemotherapy appointments for 20 weeks straight. She told me the story of how she flipped to a fresh new sheet of paper during treatment one day and drew a circle in the middle of the page. She recorded all the things she wanted in her life inside the circle, and all of the things she wanted out of her life outside of the circle.

I loved her idea so much I could hardly breathe.

Outside the circle was her “people pleasing” mentality, things she didn’t have time or energy for, and toxic relationships. Inside the circle sat her own needs and interests, and spending time with people she wanted to.

What if you got a “second chance” at life? What, and who, would sit inside your circle, and what would be unceremoniously turfed outside of it, for good reason? What priorities need to bubble up to the top for you? What trivial things do you need to deprioritize?

*** *** ***

I’m admittedly trepidatious around the topic of grief; I never want to gloss over the barbed wire of it all just to wield it as a convenient carpe diem tool. “Hey, sorry your loved one died—but look at all the valuable life lessons waiting for you when you get home from the funeral.” Noooo. And yet I want to respect that two things can be true at the same time: we can be grieving sloppily and finding inspiration in how to live. We can be struggling with a scary diagnosis and also striving to live like we mean it, for however long we have.

Mortality awareness, then, can both push us to take action on our dreams, and pull us back from living out of sync with how we really want to be spending our precious time.

If you knew you were a limited-time-only situation, how would you finish this sentence? “I don’t have time for ________.”

Life’s too short to squander it and yet it’s also too long to spend it living a version you’re not delighted by. Abandon the bullshit. You really don’t time for it, friend.