Lifelong Learner #23
What would you do if you had one month left?
To all lifelong learners,
I’ve been thinking about time. Not how to manage it, but how easily we postpone what matters most in it.
A thought I’m exploring: Why do we so often treat the important as if it were infinite, and the urgent as if it were sacred? We push the real conversation, the unwritten letter, the long-promised trip, the creative project, into some vague “later”, while we answer another email that could have waited a week.
The regrets we already know about: Australian palliative care nurse Bronnie Ware spent years caring for people in the final weeks of their lives. In her book The Top Five Regrets of the Dying, she noticed the same themes surfacing again and again at bedsides:
“I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.”
“I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.”
“I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.”
“I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.”
“I wish that I had let myself be happier.”
What’s striking is that none of these are about things people didn’t know mattered. They’re about things people postponed. The regret isn’t ignorance. It’s delay.
The one-month exercise: There’s a simple thought experiment that cuts through the fog: If I had one month left to live, how would I spend it? Not a morbid question, but a clarifying one. One month is short enough that trivialities fall away, but long enough that real things become possible. A reconciliation. A letter. A trip. A day of full presence with your children. Finishing the thing you keep not finishing.
The gap between that list and your current calendar is, in a sense, the measure of how much of your life you are postponing.
A question I’m asking myself: If I already know what I would do with one month, what am I waiting for?
Our collective challenge: This week, sit down with a pen and paper and write your one-month list. Don’t edit it. Don’t rank it. Don’t ask whether it’s realistic. Just let it come. Then read it back and circle the one item that surprises you most, the one that’s been quietly waiting the longest. That’s your signal.
Looking forward to learning together with you. Thank you 🙏
Johan