When Captain Picard Died, It Got Personal
Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about how much time I have left to live and what that means for my life now. No single moment of recognition brought this to my attention. It came from a buildup of indicators.
The deaths of friends, musicians, and actors that we’ve grown up with are all concrete evidence of the fact that we’re all going to die. As my friend David Sparks says regularly, “None of us are getting out of this alive.”
My wife and I have a habit of watching an episode of a series almost every night after dinner. We tend to rotate between three or four different series.
One series we’ve been working our way through is Star Trek: The Next Generation. We’ve become accustomed to seeing Sir Patrick Stewart as Captain Picard on a regular basis. The news of his recent death hit pretty hard.
The Lie We’ve Told Ourselves for 2,000 Years
Although we all know intellectually that we will die, we tend to behave as though it’s not true. As retirement coach and financial advisor Dan Haylett has written,
“You have always lived as if there was an open-ended amount of future ahead of you.”
Haylett wasn’t the first to point this out; Seneca said the same thing in On the Shortness of Life over 2,000 years ago:
“You live as if you were destined to live forever, no thought of your frailty ever enters your head, of how much time has already gone by you take no heed.”
I find it interesting that even in antiquity, with death a regular part of their lives, the Romans ignored the reality of death just as we do.
The Questions No One Taught Us to Ask
Why do we do this? When we’re young, we assume we have infinite time left. For young people, time can feel like it’s moving very slowly, so they don’t see it as an issue they need to think about.
Many people don’t want to think about death. They see it as morbid or negative, and it’s not something they want to consider.
Our culture doesn’t provide any approach that helps us to deal with death in a constructive way. We don’t ask and answer key questions like “How can the inevitability of our deaths have a positive effect on our lives now?” or “How can we best prepare for our deaths?” or “How can we best die?” Instead, we prefer to ignore the question, hoping it will somehow disappear.
It’s often not until we get older that we start to really understand the reality of death.
Laura Carstensen, in her article on how the sense of time influences human development, notes that as people age, the felt sense of time remaining matters more than the time since birth. This is exactly what I’ve noticed in my life and the lives of others.
Living on Bonus Time
When we’re finally at a place in our lives where we can actually face the reality of our own coming deaths, how do we respond?
Some choose to respond with anger, resentment, and depression. But others see acknowledging the reality of death as giving life value and providing motivation.
Popular writer Ryan Holiday suggests in his book The Obstacle Is the Way that,
“Reminding ourselves each day that we will die helps us treat our time as a gift.”
The Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius expressed a similar approach in Meditations 7.56–57:
“Think of the life you have lived until now as over and, as a dead man, see what’s left as a bonus and live it according to Nature.”
5 Things That Change When You See Life as a Gift
If we see what is left of our lives as a gift or a bonus, it can have significant practical results now:
- Gratitude for living our life and what we enjoy in life. Our natural response to gifts is gratitude. When we see our life itself as a gift, how could we not be grateful for it?
- Valuing our loved ones, friends and possessions. We all tend to take what we have for granted. Realizing we have only limited time with everyone and everything in our lives helps us value those things more in the present.
- Motivation to determine what’s most important in our lives. If we recognize that we have limited time left to live our lives, that gives added value to each moment. Instead of wasting that time on the unimportant, we’ll want to determine what’s most important in our lives and make sure we do those things.
- Motivation to leave the legacy we desire. Knowing our life is limited, we begin to think about what we will leave behind. What can we contribute that will help others, leave an example, or inspire others for good?
- Preparation for our deaths. We can do things now that will make it easier for loved ones after we die. For instance, I’ve been paying several hundred dollars a month for the last 14 years so that if I die before my wife (statistically likely), she will continue to receive a portion of my military retirement.
We can also prepare for how we want to face death. Do you have a philosophy of life that also helps to prepare you to face your own death? Personally, I want to face my death with courage and gratitude, and do what I can to help the transition for those who will be left without me.
I Wouldn’t Change the Big Decisions, But I’d Change This
Looking back at my life, I wish I had had a better sense when I was younger of how limited my time would be.
However, I don’t think I would have changed many of the major choices I made. Most of those came from doing what seemed best at the time, given the circumstances and options available, and from a sense of responsibility to provide for my family.
What would have changed, however, was a stronger sense of self-awareness and gratitude for the present moment and the time I have left.
Two Questions That Bookend My Day
Now I find it extremely helpful to build opportunities to express gratitude into each day. I do that by including a journaling prompt in my morning routine: “What am I grateful for?” And then, during my evening shutdown, I respond to the question, “What happened today that I’m grateful for?”
These prompts help me to focus on moments in my life that I experience and am grateful for. They’re often not big-deal items, but rather ordinary things that I have in my life. Sometimes as simple as being alive to experience a beautiful sunrise.
The Bonus Is Already Here
Marcus Aurelius suggested we treat the rest of our lives as a bonus. The bonus isn’t something waiting for us in the future. It’s today, this morning, this conversation, this sunrise.
So here’s my challenge: pick one item from the list above and act on it this week. Thank someone you’ve taken for granted. Spend an hour on something that really matters to you. Take one step toward preparing for the people you’ll leave behind.
None of us are getting out of this alive. But we can choose how we spend the time between now and then.
Note: I wrote this blog post myself using my own words and thoughts for the initial draft. I used AI only to suggest headlines, section headings, images and text improvements.
Links to product pages on Amazon include a referral code which pays me a small percentage of the sale when products are purchased. This helps to defray some of the costs of running this site. I strive to only include links to products I believe are worth purchasing.