"Year to Live” Study Group

This blog and the project it documents seems like an interesting and rewarding endeavor.

In an ideal world, I’d live out my 80+year life expectancy and die quietly in my sleep.  “She was healthy & sharp until the very end,” they’d all say.

 But I’m trying something different here.  This time around I’ll take my final breath at age 43.  I’m participating in a “Year to Live” study group, based on the book of that name by Stephen Levine.  We’re a group of about 25 who meet once a month . . . .  We’ve all been given the hypothetical date of January 20, 2011 to live.

 “What a downer,” some have said.  “Why on earth would you do that?” others manage.  For me, this is really an exercise in living.  It may seem counter-intuitive at first, but I believe that there can be no better way to learn to live fully than to live with a sense of the immediacy and the impermanence of it all.  After all, wiser men & women than I have undertaken similar quests since the beginning of time.  Many of them have been transformed by it.