Life is not a Dress Rehearsal

by Elizabeth Butler, Dreamfedjob editor

I recently read a motivational article that talked about a "deathbed" exercise. This exercise aims at making you think of the things that you would think about in the last hours of your live, i.e. deathbed.

For example:

• What are you glad and sad about your work life?
• Your relationships?
• Your charitable efforts?
• Your hobbies?

Or in my case:

• I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
• I wish I didn’t work so hard.
• I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.
• I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.
• I wish that I had let myself be happier.

Having gone through this exercise, I'd like to encourage you take a few minutes to complete the exercise and find out if you need or should make changes to your life, direction, goals, etc.

Years ago I came across a bumper sticker that said "Life is not a dress rehearsal."  I dismissed it and got on with my day.  A few hours later I started to think about it and the more I thought about it the more sense it made. At the time I worked as a phone collection specialist, for a horrible boss, who had an even more horrible boss. I believe my salary was 19K or so per year. I was a young, miserable, low-level employee at a very small company in Washington DC working for a horrible boss.

Like a plane flying on automatic pilot, I was going through my daily routines thinking I was never going to die and had all the time in the world to make choices, personal and professional. If John McLaughlin, executive producer and host of The McLaughlin Group had been by my side he would had said: "WRONG!"

Pretending you are going to live forever is detrimental to your enjoyment of life. It is detrimental in the same way that it would be wrong for a football player to pretend there was no end to the game he was playing. That player would reduce his intensity, adopt a lazy playing style, and, of course, end up not having any fun at all. Without an end, there is no game. Without being conscious of death, you can't be fully aware of the gift of life.

Yet many of us (including myself) keep pretending that our life's game will have no end. We keep planning to do great things some day when we feel like it. We assign our goals and dreams to that imaginary day called "tomorrow," or "soon." We find ourselves saying, "Someday I'll do this," and "Someday I'll do that."

Confronting our mortality doesn't have to wait until we run out of life. In fact, being able to vividly imagine our last hours on our deathbed makes the cliché “Life is not a Dress Rehearsal” something to really think about. James Dean once said “Dream as if you will live forever; live as if you will die today.”