If your doctor said you only had six months to live, what would you do? Arguably one of the most overused and misused kick-start questions in coaching (and movie plots). Living every day as if it were your last could result in unreasonable, even hurtful or dangerous behaviors.
Have you ever given thought to the opposite? How would you approach your life if you had a guarantee of living at least another 25, 50 or 60 years. It’s not unthinkable to live to be ninety. Even if you are 60, you could easily have another 25 years or more to live. Whatever the duration, would you choose to live all of those years exactly as you are living now? Would you be satisfied to say “This is what my life is – this is all there is ever going to be.”?
Take a moment to examine your life. Are you energetic and optimisitic or are you running on empty and always expecting the worse? Are you pursuing what you love to do, or are you trudging off to work (or sitting at home) mourning the lack of time and energy to do what you enjoy? Worse yet, do you absolutely hate your job? Are you really prepared to live this way for the rest of your life – no matter how long this life may end up being?
Anna Mary Robertson was born in 1860. She spent all of her life farming, first as a young girl, and then as the wife of Thomas Moses. Like many women of her time Anna was an accomplished needlework artist, but in the mid 1930’s, the liesure passtime she loved so dearly became more and more difficult because of her arthritic hands. Well into her 70’s, she could have bid her passion farewell and said This is what my life has been – all there is ever going to be. Instead she wondered if she could express her joy of living in another art form, and tried her hand at painting. Her paintings featured the things she loved, the changing seasons and the various activities of farm life—sleigh rides, quilting bees, making soap or apple butter, barn dances, and county fairs. You may have guessed by now that Anna Mary Roberston-Moses is none other than Grandma Moses.
Okay, you’re thinking, I’ve heard this one before. But, have you really payed attention? In 1930, the average life expectancy for women was 61 years. Grandma Moses was already beyond that. It would have been easy, perhaps even expected of her to just sit in her rocker and wait for a peaceful farewell. Maybe her family even discouraged, or worse, ridiculed her desire to keep expressing her joy for life when she was obviously so close to death. In a frugal, farming community was she begrudged the expense of painting supplies? What obstacles might Grandma Moses had to have overcome to keep her spirit alive? What ever they were, it’s a good thing for her she persevered – she had a lot of living left to do.
Grandma Moses wrote her autobiography in the early 1950’s (What, yet another career as a writer?) and lived another decade beyond that. Had Grandma Moses laid down her needlework and called it a day, she would have spent the next quarter of a century just passing time, and the world would never have received the gift of her paintings, a visual expression of her joie de vivre .
If you have more time left to live than you think, how will you live it? It can be a Beautiful World.
Learn to live well and long at www.livingwellcoach.com
