A Bit of an Obit

By Coach Cary Bayer www.carybayer.com

A major reason so many people put off doing what they want in their lives is because they think they have so much time left to live. The average life span of an American woman is 81.2 years, for men, 76.4. That means just 29,638 days and 27,886 days, respectively. Ladies, chances are good more than half of those days are already gone, even more if you’re a man.

Each day that passes off the calendar means one less day from that total. You’re not here forever; the window of opportunity in life keeps closing, a little with each exhalation of breath. I don’t say this to scare you, but to alert you to the fact time is passing and, if you’re not yet doing what you’re really here to do, what are you waiting for? It’s high time you get on with living the purpose of your life that you came to this planet to live.

You left your mother’s womb naked in body, but you brought with you a genetic code inherited from your parents, and from their parents, too.

You were also born with tendencies, talents, gifts that were intended not so much to amuse yourself on a Saturday afternoon as a hobby to unwind from a rough work week doing something that you wouldn’t do if you didn’t need the money. You were given God-given talents to make the world a better place, to bring the world your very best with these skills you were born with. Doing anything less means depriving the world of your best.

But this is not the case: most people in the industrialized world don’t enjoy what they do for a living. It’s fear, of course, that prevents so many of these people from bringing what they love to the world for a livelihood, or more precisely, a lovelihood.

One powerful way to access what you really want to do in life is to do an exercise I have students do in my “How to Discover & Live Your Purpose” workshop.

It’s called “Write your Obituary.” While the word obituary strikes an even deeper fear into their hearts than doing what they love to pay their bills, the exercise works wonders.
It’s true that most people won’t have obituaries written for them after dying, unless their famous, but writing your own let’s you see the what you really want to do in life, what’s really important to you.

Do you want it to say that you labored for 45 years in a career that means little to you at best, or that you hated at worst? Do you want this obituary to indicate you never did the things that stirred your soul? This exercise forces you to begin thinking about what you want to start doing in life that would make your life one that’s truly worth living, one that gets you up enthusiastically every morning to do what brings you joy and fulfills the meaning of your existence.

The obituary helps you see what you’re doing that’s inconsistent with your true purpose. It inspires you to change what you’re doing so that you can be on purpose. You may need a gradual change in that part of your life: like Rome, a business wasn’t built in a day.

But does your obituary include any mention of your spiritual development? It should. To be truly on purpose you also need to get on with spiritual realization —the primary reason that you came to this planet is for you to realize your oneness with the Creator of this planet. So find something to help you wake up spiritually — be it meditation, Yoga, Tai Chi, or the esoteric inner truths of your religion.

Now that the obituary inspires you, start today by taking steps to make what you wrote what you do. You have a gap between your current reality and the life that you aspire to as recorded in your obituary. If you start closing that gap your life will become so much more exciting, and so much more fulfilling. It’s the life you were truly born to live.