When Do We Contemplate Our Mortality?

"Practice dying," Plato said from his deathbed when his students asked for one last lesson. He wasn't suggesting suicide attempts. He was talking about learning how to find purpose and completion with your life and how to let go of attachments.

Until we are past retirement age, most Americans don't think about dying unless it is right in front of us, or in front of a friend. Dying is something that happens to someone else. Not me ... just yet.

If you had a week, a month or a year to live, what would you shift to the forefront?

In South Korea there is a thriving business in staging mock funerals for college students, including wills, burial clothes and laying in a coffin. See (The Young and The Departed). The intent is to fully imagine your death and thereby sharpen your true priorities in life.

Isn't that the essence of conscious living, to know your lifetime priorities and act upon them? How freeing is that?

Nick