"Move It Up"

"Seldom do we take a moment to appreciate our incredible good fortune being alive. As Oxford biologist Richard Dawkins writes: 'We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Sahara. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively outnumbers the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here…'

And none of us knows how long he’s going to be here.

Take Eugene O’Kelly, former Chairman and CEO of accounting giant KPMG, for example. Four years ago, he was diagnosed with inoperable, late-stage brain cancer. He was told he had three to six months to live. He was 53. Suddenly, the life of this rich, powerful and privileged man, whose days were filled with executive meetings and business appointments, became something very different. He was left with less than 100 days to live.

“No more living in the future,” he wrote in his memoir. “(Or the past, for that matter – a problem for many people, although a lesser one for me.) I needed to stop living two months, a week, even a few hours ahead. Even a few minutes ahead. Sixty seconds from now is, in its way, as elusive as sixty years from now, and always will be. It is – was – exhausting to live in a world that never exists. Also kind of silly, since we happen to be blessed with such a fascinating one right here, right now. I felt that if I could learn to stay in the present moment, to be fully conscious of my surroundings, I would buy myself lots of time that had never been available to me, not in all the years I was healthy…”

With the clock counting down, O’Kelly made a list of his closest friends and colleagues and planned a final encounter with each one: “I stopped at each name and made myself recall, in the closest detail possible, all the moments the two of us had enjoyed together. How we met. What made us become friends in the first place. The qualities in them I particularly appreciated. The lessons I learned by knowing them. The ways in which having met him or her had made me a better person.” His friends were touched – usually overwhelmed – to know how much they had meant to him. “Enjoy every sandwich,” he writes.

Most of us promise ourselves that one day – not too long from now – we’ll slow down. We’ll spend more time with our family. Enjoy a lazy day out with friends. Or just take a walk alone in the woods or on the seashore. Some day…

If – like me – you’re one of the millions who has often deluded himself this way, O’Kelly has three words of advice: “Move it up.” Eugene O’Kelly died on September 10th, 2005."

- Alexander Green, http://www.dailyreckoning.com

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