Effortless Thursdays #35: Death will come. Until then, try this 👇

Live your day as if it's your first - with joy and being you.

Glenridding hiking up to St Sunday Crag, Lake District National Park

Death comes to all of us.

It recently greeted my music teacher from school, David Nield, a towering figure in all senses, but particularly for his achievements in music.

When I heard of his passing, I recalled the moment when he had set us a test at the end of the first week of music class at school.

One of the questions was:

"Who wrote Beethoven's 5th Symphony?"

I remember thinking, ‘What kind of question is that?’ and 'Was this a trick question?’. 

I mean, surely the answer was Beethoven? Or was it?

Dear readers, I can confirm that the answer was Beethoven; it still is!  

Yet, I can also confirm it is not "Mozart", which is the answer I had scribbled on my page. Surprisingly, I wasn’t the only 11-year old student who had thought the composer of Beethoven’s 5th Symphony was someone other than Beethoven!

Death also greeted Ed's dad. Ed is a friend from school and has been living with the tangling up of the remaining family relationships after a family member departs.

Within a matter of days, Sinead O'Connor, the singer and campaigner, and George Alagiah, the BBC journalist, newsreader and presenter were next. Death also arrived for them.

Don't live like it's your last day!

These deaths made me think of how we often hear in motivational circles: 

"Live life as if it's your last day!"

What codswollop! It seems so constrained, and frankly impractical when you think about it.

I mean, are you going to have the same "last" conversation with those you love today. And then tomorrow, and the day after that? 

If you were on death row, would you have the same last meal again, and again?

The reality is that today, and the tomorrow that follows, isn't your last day. It could be, but I think there’s an alternative, less suffocating way that avoids counting down our days left.

What would it be like if - in the face of death and the inevitable conclusion for each of us - that we lived each day of our lives as if it were our first?

Live each day as if it were your first

I can't take credit for this idea alone, because I saw this image as I was hearing about those string of deaths. Talk about timing!

David Shrigley screenprint

It's a screenprint by David Shrigley and it arrived in an email from the Quantus Gallery recently. I was there recently as a guest of the law firm, Reed Smith, when they hosted their LGBTQI+ summer party. You can find more about the artist here.

What's wonderful about this approach is that it comes from a place of abundance, rather than scarcity.

If it’s our last day, we dwell on what’s left.

Acting like it’s our first day opens up what is possible.

And then there’s living days that are neither your first or your last.

Like when you've been in your career for more years than you care to think about, the joy of that starry-eyed, bushy tailed new employee (yes, you!) might, by now, have dissipated. Instead it’s turned into an obligation that you feel you have to endure.

💡Imagine what it would be like to bring back some or all of that joy you used to have.💡

I was on a work trip to Luxembourg with a colleague many years ago. Her family had just got a new puppy. On the train back from Gatwick Airport into London Victoria, she said:

"I'm looking forward to getting home because our puppy will be wagging its tail as I walk through the front door. Usually, my daughters barely say hello and my husband stays sitting on the sofa when I walk through the door."

Dogs are wonderfully effusive with their "I love you. I love you. I love you"-greetings, as if they are seeing you for the first time. And it never tires - for them, or for us.

💡Imagine how your relationships could change if you arrived at home for the first time each time.💡

Death is an opportunity for our curiosity to flourish

So how do we bring this approach practically into our lives?

Invite curiosity into our lives.

I mentioned to my husband, Andrew, this morning that this week's Effortless Thursdays was about death, and he retorted that he might skip this edition. It's an understandable reaction given how our brains might stir the emotional cauldron of our past experiences with death.

I turned to him and said that I was offering a different take on death - that in amongst the emotional turmoil when we grapple with loss, there is a place for curiosity.

Not living each day as if it were our last, but living as if it were our first.

To treat death as an opportunity to wonder, to ask, to do something different, to focus your attention and effort on something new or unusual.

To treat each day - even when death has not come - like our four-legged friends do, and embody that infectious "I love you".

Curiosity might not offer itself straight away in our rollercoaster of emotions, but it allows us to wonder about what’s possible.

Curiosity is like landing on ‘Chance’ in Monopoly, advancing to Go, and collecting your £200. It takes you away from what you’ve come to expect - the dread of landing on your arch-enemy’s 3 hotels and realising you have no cash left. What might now be possible with that extra £200?

Over to you!

In Effortless Thursdays #33 I shared 11 bottom-up approaches to replace all-consuming overwhelm with equanimity.

Effortless Thursdays #33: Overcoming the overwhelm of big (and small) decisions

This week, I invite you to cultivate your curiosity muscle, and ask yourself - whether you’re in the midst of grief, loss, or at a crossroads in your life:

"Where does my curiosity take me now?"

Be curious as if it were your first day.

Your first day back home from work, walking through the front door. 

Your first day meeting your colleague.

You first day without someone close to you.

Today’s edition was also inspired by my friend, Silvio. He wrote back in May 2023 about Miles Davis, the tyranny of time, and what if we lived with an infinite time mindset.

It’s a wonderfully nourishing read.

On the Tyranny of Time

That’s it for this week!

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To your health and success!

Eric