​Epic Quest progress report: Today is day 23. Total word count: 9471 words.

We say it so often it’s become a self-help cliche:

Live today as if it’s your last day.

Sometimes, we phrase it a little differently:

If you knew today was your last day, would you spend it the same way you always do?

It’s meant to inspire us, to help us see that maybe we really don’t have to be stuck doing what we do day after day.

But when your kids’ health care depends on you doing the same thing day after day, it sounds a little empty. Or naive. Or selfish. Or maybe even insulting. Because that anonymous author has no idea what it’s like to live in our shoes, try to live up to our responsibilities and make the best way we can in an indifferent world. That author caught a break somewhere down the line, and the right people saw something they did, and now they get to spend their time laboring at something they like to do, and maybe you could do that too except you have a mortgage and school debt and three kids and your parents are broke and you just don’t have the extra time or energy to send personalized, hand-written poems to the mother of everybody on the Forbes 400 list.

It’s exhausting just thinking about it. Honestly, if that’s what it takes to live like there’s no tomorrow, you’re not sure you really want it.

But what if we could phrase it a little differently?

What if the real question were something like this, instead: If this were someone’s only chance to experience you, is this the way you’d want them to know you?

That question feels much more relevant to me. Because it’s less about having or getting or even doing than it is about being. The question becomes Who do I want to be? more than What do I want to do?

And when that’s the question, the answer comes much more easily. Because if you want to spend the day hiking at ten thousand feet, that probably means you don’t want to spend the day trying to cram all your real work in around two three-hour meetings, then spend two hours helping with homework, then make supper, then listen about your family’s hard days while you try not to think about mountains. But if you want to be dependable and loving and helpful and a good listener, if you want the people around you to use all those words at your funeral… well, you can do all the same things, with less guilt, and maybe you don’t spend quite as much time pining over the mountains. And maybe you enjoy the time you spend there more than you would have otherwise.

So maybe that’s the question we need to be asking. Because who we choose to be is about much more than how we choose to spend our time.