-> If you were to go tomorrow, would you say you lived a meaningful life?
-> What is your identity?
-> What are your values? Do your life choices align with them?
I just finished 'When Breath Becomes Air' by Paul Kalanithi. He wrote this book just before his death. It's an account of his thought provoking journey from being a curious student to a doctor to a patient to a father, written with the clear perspective of someone who is terminally ill.
Some thoughts really stood out for me -
"You can't ever reach perfection, but you can believe in an asymptote toward which you are ceaselessly striving." He says this in the context of actively engaging with death as he tries to help his patients beat death, while knowing fully well the deck is stacked against him and that death always wins. This is a beautiful phrasing of what we all experience everyday.
"Before operating on a patient's brain, I must first understand his mind: his identity, his values, what makes his life worth living, and what devastation makes it reasonable to let that life end." The context is the judgement a neurosurgeon has to make when planning high risk operations. A millimetre of difference can debilitate the patient in various ways.
"When you come to one of the many moments in life where you must give an account of yourself, provide a ledger of what you have been, and done, and meant to the world, do not, I pray, discount that you filled a dying man's days with a sated joy, a joy unknown to me in all my prior years, a joy that does not hunger for more and more but rests, satisfied. In this time, right now, that is an enormous thing." His message to his baby daughter who was 9 months old when he died.
"In the end, it cannot be doubted that each of us can see only a part of the picture. The doctor sees one, the patient another, the engineer a third, the economist a fourth, the pearl diver a fifth, the alcoholic a sixth, the cable guy a seventh, the sheep farmer an eighth, the Indian beggar a ninth, the pastor a tenth. Human knowledge is never contained in one person. It grows from the relationships we create between each other and the world, and still it is never complete." He says in his search for truth.
When you see life from a dying person's eyes, it shines a light on how you've lived your own. And for me, sadly, it doesn't look good.
But it's never too late to begin to strive for that asymptote. My line will perhaps remain a bit farther from the curve but, if I start now then perhaps by the end of my life, I'd still have made a journey towards that imaginary point where the line meets the curve and perfection lies.
